5 Web Scraping APIs for Data Extraction & Automation
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Web scraping can save you A LOT of time.
It can help you to speed up pulling together data like page optimisations, keywords and content from both your competitors and your own/client sites.
Once you’ve pulled all this information together (aka, scraping it together) you can do the bit you can’t automate: analyse it.
See which keywords are driving traffic to a website, which content pages are attracting the most backlinks and what pages users are engaging with, and so on.
Check out these web scraping APIs (+ documentation):
Apify
Apify provides a web scraper API to crawl web pages and extract structured data from them using just a few lines of JavaScript code.
It can be run manually in a user interface, or programmatically using the API. All extracted data is stored in a dataset, and can be exported in formats, like JSON, XML, or CSV.
Parse Hub
Parse Hub is a free web scraping tool that, in their own words, allows you to turn any site into a spreadsheet or API, and easily extract the data you need.
Data can be scraped from data from multiple pages. It It is collected by their servers and then results can be downloaded via JSON, Excel or API.
Scraper API
Scraper API is a cloud-based web scraping API that handles proxy rotation, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so you can scrape any page with just a single API call.
Oh, and you get 1000 free API calls. Nice.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a great web scraping API to automate data extraction from websites with just a few clicks and without coding.
It can deal with all types of websites (infinite scroll, login, drop-downs, AJAX etc) and you can schedule tasks at specific times.
Scraping Bee
Scraping Bee is a scraping API that rotates proxies and handles headless browsing for you.
It can handle extracting the data from web pages, scraping the SERPs and extracting contact information.
Sidenote: What is web scraping & is it legal?
Before you dive in and start scraping left, right and centre, there are some things you should know first.
Web scraping is the collecting of information from websites and the internet as a whole.
Now, search engines scrape a metric shit tonne of data (technical term) to put together their search results.
Just the same way, websites can scrape information from uploaded data or comments or publically accessible data to improve UX.
Whenever a user visits a website or opens a link, acceptance of the individual website’s privacy policy is assumed – and if you read it more carefully, you will notice that data collection (including cookies) gets mentioned first.
So is web scraping legal?
Yes, as long as you do it ethically.
Web scraping is legal, as long as the information gathered does not compromise the user itself (and often, does not individually identify the user). As long as the gathered information is applied to improve user experience and not to spam or sell something, you are okay.
All sites collect data in some way. Web scraping is just another form of data collection.
Scraping & data extraction APIs for marketers
Think I’ve missed a scraping API? Just let me know and I’ll add it.
Don’t forget to go check out the other Marketing APIs →