How to Prevent Web Scraping By Blocking Proxies Using IP Geolocation

As a website owner, excessive web scraping can be a frustrating issue. Scrapers retrieve data from your site through bots and scripts, often bypassing blocks using proxy servers. This guide will walk through how to prevent scrapers accessing your website by detecting and blocking proxies using IP geolocation.

Let‘s First Understand Web Scraping

Before we dive into solutions, it helps to better understand what web scraping is and why people do it.

Web scraping refers to the practice of automatically collecting data from websites through scripts and bots. These tools programmatically browse web pages, identify relevant information, and extract it in a structured format.

Some common examples of web scraping include:

• Price comparison – Pulling product prices from ecommerce sites to spot pricing trends.

• News aggregation – Scraping news articles from multiple sources to centralize headlines.

• Lead generation – Gathering business contact details from directories to build sales leads.

• Research – Collecting dataset tables posted on websites for analysis.

Web scraping is done through scripts containing libraries like Python and Selenium. These automate visiting web pages, locating target data, and saving it to a database or file.

Scraping public information in moderation is often legally permissible. The data is publicly accessible, so there is no unauthorized access. However, excessive scraping can constitute copyright infringement or violate a website‘s Terms of Service.

Aggressive, high-volume scraping can also harm website infrastructure. Thousands of bots pinging a site nonstop can bog down servers and severely degrade performance. This affects the experience for legitimate users.

As a site owner, at a certain point you will want to detect and stop abusive web scraping activities. That‘s where understanding proxies comes in.

How Proxies Are Used in Web Scraping

To evade blocks, scrapers often use proxy servers when extracting data from websites. A proxy acts as an intermediary that forwards web traffic:

Here‘s how proxies facilitate web scraping:

• Users configure scraping bots to connect through proxy servers instead of directly.

• The proxies relay the scrape requests, masking the bots‘ original IPs.

• This allows bots to bypass IP blocks since requests appear to come from the proxies‘ IPs.

• Proxies provide fresh IPs to rotate through, helping scrape at higher volumes.

Basically, proxies enable scrapers to avoid blocks and extract data more efficiently. Let‘s look closer at why this is an issue for website owners.

Why Blocking Proxy Access Reduces Web Scraping Abuse

Blocking known proxy servers can significantly reduce malicious web scraping of your site. Here are 5 key benefits:

1. Prevent blocked scrapers from re-accessing your site

Once you identify and block abusive scrapers, they can simply reroute through proxy servers to evade your IP blocks. Shutting down proxy access closes this loophole.

2. Stop unknown scrapers abusing your site behind proxy masks

Scrapers often use random proxy IPs you haven‘t blocked yet. Blocking proxies helps cut off this backdoor for unknown scrapers to harvest your data.

3. Protect your infrastructure from strain and denial of service

Proxy-powered scraping bots can overwhelm your servers with huge volumes of requests. Blocking them preserves site performance for real visitors.

4. Reduce legal, compliance, and data privacy risks

Mass scraping of data can violate copyright laws and data regulations in some cases. It also carries privacy risks if data is combined from various sources. Limiting scraping reduces these potential issues.

5. Safeguard your investment and ownership of your platform

While public info can be scraped, the way you collect, structure, and present data on your site represents real investment and ownership. Blocking scraping helps protect this.

Intelligently filtering out proxy access can significantly reduce malicious scraping while still allowing legitimate users of privacy tools to access your content.

Detecting Proxies by Analyzing IP Geolocation

To block proxy access, the first step is identifying incoming traffic from proxy servers vs direct connections. Comparing IP geolocations is an effective method to catch proxies.

What is IP Geolocation?

Geolocation refers to mapping an IP address to the physical, geographic location of the network it‘s registered to.

When you look up an IP address, the geolocation tells you details like:

• Country, region, and city the IP is located in
• Latitude and longitude coordinates
• Internet service provider (ISP) it‘s assigned to

Proxy servers are typically registered to different geographic regions than where their user base is actually located. By comparing IP geolocations to expected locations, we can reveal mismatched proxy IPs.

IP Geolocation Signals for Identifying Proxies

Here are common patterns proxies exhibit related to geolocation that can help detect them:

• IP address located in an unfamiliar region – Proxies are often registered abroad, so they may show up in foreign countries that don‘t match your typical visitor locales.

• IP location doesn‘t match user‘s locale – Browsers communicate the language/locale of users. If this doesn‘t align with the IP‘s region, it indicates a proxy.

• IP address has a frequently changing geolocation history – Proxy IPs switch between locations over time, where real visitors‘ IPs remain static.

• IP address belongs to a hosting provider or proxy service – IPs owned by servers from cloud providers like AWS or proxy vendors flag clear proxies.

Let‘s explore techniques to leverage these signals:

Filter Traffic Originating from Unrecognized Locations

Analyze where your legitimate website traffic is coming from – the countries, regions, cities, internet providers, etc.

Build a whitelist of IP locales that represent the majority of your real visitors. Then, filter out traffic originating from unknown locations outside expected boundaries as probable proxies.

For example, if you operate a local business in Houston, Texas, you could set up rules to block IPs not from the United States. This would stop proxies registered abroad from accessing your site.

Compare IP Location to Browser Locale

When browsers make requests to sites, they include headers indicating the user‘s configured language and location preferences.

You can check if the locale indicated by the browser aligns with the actual geoIP lookup. If not, it‘s a clear sign of a proxy IP masquerading for a user elsewhere.

For example, if you get a request where the browser headers indicate a locale of Japan, but the IP is assigned to a Brazilian ISP, you can be confident it‘s a proxy.

Check Geolocation History Patterns

See if an IP address stays static in one location, or frequently switches between different countries over time.

Legitimate visitor IPs generally remain fixed in one geographic area. Proxy servers often rotate through various locations.

You can flag IPs that jump between distant or unaligned regions as probable proxies based on this history analysis.

Identify Known Proxy IP Ranges

Check IPs against lists of IP blocks and ranges known to be associated with proxy services and hosting providers.

These include VPN services, residential proxies, data center IPs, cloud hosting ranges, Tor exit nodes, etc. Known proxy ranges provide clear signals for blocking.

You can compile these lists yourself or leverage existing proxy and IP reputation services that provide frequently updated ranges.

Combining Multiple Geolocation Signals

Using any one proxy detection signal on its own carries a risk of false positives. You can improve accuracy by verifying multiple signals:

For instance, you may flag an IP as a proxy if:

• It‘s located outside your expected visitor region whitelist

• It has a history switching between very different locales

• It‘s tied to a hosting provider‘s IP range

Checking for multiple aligning factors minimizes the chances of mistakenly blocking legitimate visitors.

Turning Proxy Insights Into Security Actions

Once you‘ve identified proxy access, you can take action to block it at different levels:

Server firewall rules

Configure firewall policies on your web servers to reject traffic from IP addresses that are tagged as proxies. This provides low-level blocking.

Application code

In your app code, check the visitor IP against your proxy blacklist and deny access for matches. This allows for customizable blocking logic in your app.

CAPTCHAs

Present a CAPTCHA challenge to verify requests are from a real human for IPs your system flags as proxies. This hampers scraping bots.

Rate limiting

Slow down request rates from suspicious IPs using throttling. This frustrates scraping efforts by limiting how quickly they can access data.

User tracking

Tag proxy IPs with tracking cookies or fingerprints to monitor for abusive patterns like repeatedly scraping content. Detect abuse to block.

Make sure to log blocked IPs and monitor for false positives impacting real visitors. Refine your proxy criteria to improve accuracy based on findings.

Balancing Security While Still Allowing Legitimate Proxy Use

Proxy blocking does require care to avoid accidentally blocking legitimate proxy users, like:

• Privacy-concerned users routing through consumer VPNs

• Corporate employees accessing your site via required work VPNs

• Travelers abroad connecting through VPNs to access region-restricted content

There are ways to design proxy filtering for security that still allows appropriate proxy use:

✔️ Only block IP ranges of data centers and commercial proxy services, avoiding consumer VPN ranges that regular users rely on.

✔️ Check full locale history instead of just blocking all foreign IPs, which may block travelers who exhibit a consistent locale.

✔️ Require multiple proxy criteria to align before blocking an IP to minimize false positives that could impact legitimate use.

✔️ Initially rate limit suspicious IPs instead of fully blocking them right away. Monitor their behavior over time for signs of actual abuse first.

✔️ Have an appeal process to review blocked IPs and whitelist any that appear to be flagged incorrectly.

With care taken on avoiding overblocking, proxy detection via geolocation can significantly reduce abusive scraping without hampering legitimate proxy use.

Leveraging IP Geolocation APIs for Convenience

Typically implementing robust proxy detection and IP geolocation analysis requires maintaining large datasets and dedicated infrastructure.

However, services like Abstract‘s IP Geolocation API make it easy to integrate proxy blocking into apps and systems.

Benefits of using a pre-built IP geolocation API include:

• Automatic proxy identification – Abstract flags VPNs, Tor, data center ranges, residential proxies, and other potential scraping sources.

• Connection details – APIs provide full context like ISP, ASN, domain, company data, and more for each IP address.

• Pinpoint location accuracy – Geolocate IPs precisely to postal code granularity based on latest data.

• Historical location data – See full geolocation history for an IP address over time to analyze patterns.

• Reputation data – Abstract includes insights like bot scores, usage categorization, threat classifications, and other reputation metrics.

• Real-time updates – Underlying IP data stays continuously updated, unlike static IP datasets.

By handling the heavy lifting behind the scenes, IP geolocation APIs make it easy to integrate robust proxy detection and response right into your website, app, or data flows.

The Takeaway: Stop Scraping Proxies in Their Tracks

Left unchecked, excessive web scraping through proxies can significantly harm infrastructure, finances, and user experience.

By leveraging IP geolocation intelligence to identify proxy traffic, website owners can detect scrapers and take action. Comparing location history, expected regions, proxy ranges, and other signals allows proxies to be filtered out with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Implementing effective proxy blocking improves security and stops abusive bots, while still accommodating legitimate proxy use cases. Visitors worldwide can access your content through privacy tools, without enabling platforms to take advantage.

With a sound proxy filtering strategy powered by geolocation, you can eliminate scraper exploitation of your website and protect the hard work you‘ve invested in building your online presence. Here‘s to keeping your data in the right hands!