Source: https://fingerprint.com/blog/website-content-scraping-prevention/It’s nearly impossible to prevent 100% of all content scraping attempts. Ultimately, your goal as a website owner is to increase the difficulty level for scrapers.
Preventing content scraping is essential to protecting your brand, reputation, and search engine rankings. Here are some tools and techniques to help prevent content scraping:
- Robots.txt: Your website should have a Robots.txt file. This file tells web robots which pages on your site should not be visited or crawled.
- Web Application Firewalls (WAF): WAFs can detect and block suspicious activity, including web scrapers.
- CAPTCHA: Implementing CAPTCHA tests can help determine whether a user is a human or a bot. While CAPTCHAs offer more protection than WAFs, they add friction during the user verification process for the typical website visitor that could affect conversion if not implemented effectively.
- IP Blocking: Block IP ranges, countries, and data centers known to host scrapers.
- User Behavior Analysis: Monitoring user behavior can help identify bots. For example, if a user visits hundreds of pages per minute, it’s likely a bot.
If you know of other tools and methods, share them below.