Yelp Crawl: Merchant Review Capture Solution

What's the hard part about Yelp crawling? Find out why they blocked you.

Engaged in data collection of the old iron understand, Yelp anti-climbing mechanism is more strict than the pro-mother to check the phone. Especially the review data, directly related to the core interests of the platform. Last year, a buddy used his own broadband to climb for three days in a row.The IP is directly blacked out, even the usual accounts are blocked, a bloody lesson.

Here's a misconception to correct: many people think they just need to control the frequency of requests. In fact, Yelp looks at a combination ofIP address, device fingerprints, behavioral tracesThree dimensions. For example, if you visit from a New York IP in the morning and cut to a Los Angeles IP in the afternoon, this kind of temporal transience will definitely trigger an alert.

 Typical code examples
import requests
for page in range(1,100): response = requests.get(f'{page}')
    response = requests.get(f'https://www.yelp.com/biz/xxx/review_feed?page={page}') Continuous page flipping will be blocked!

Live and learn the three main sets of proxy IPs

Here's to teach you a couple of battle-tested scenarios, using ipipgo's service as an example:

Trope 1: The principle of territorial matching
For example, if you want to crawl San Francisco Chinese restaurant reviews, then use California residential IPs exclusively. ipipgo has the advantage of being able toPrecision to city-level positioningUnlike some proxies that show up in California that are actually Texas server room IPs.

Set 2: Dynamic Rotation Strategy
It is recommended that you change IPs every 20 comments you collect, but be aware of two things:
1. the new IP must belong to the same carrier as the previous IP (e.g., both are Comcast)
2. The changeover time should simulate the reading speed of a real person, so as not to switch to the whole point of the jam seconds.

Set III: Failure to Remedy Mechanisms
Prepare a monitoring script that automatically executes when it encounters a 403 status code:
1. Immediate pause of 30-90 seconds
2. Switching ipipgo's whitelisted IPs (fixed IPs in the enterprise package are recommended)
3. Clear local cookies and log in again

QA session: Don't step on these potholes

Q: Obviously used proxy IP or still blocked?
A: Check if the IP carriesHOST header contamination, some cheap proxies modify HTTP headers. Use ipipgo's detection interface to verify this:

curl --proxy http://user:pass@ipipgo-proxy:port https://ip.ipipgo.com/header-check

Q: What should I do if the collection speed is like a snail?
A: Don't use free proxies! ipipgo's business package supportsconcurrent tunnelingThe test can run up to 500Mbps bandwidth. Remember to add "Connection: keep-alive" in the request header to multiplex the link.

Q: How are legal risks avoided?
A: Focus! While it is not illegal to collect public data, be careful:
1. Don't touch private user data (phone numbers, content of private messages)
2. set robots.txt parser to avoid prohibited directories
3. Commercial recommendations for the purchase of ipipgo'sCompliance packagesservice

Tell the truth.

The proxy service providers on the market are a mixed bag, and some small workshops have IP pools with hundreds of addresses to use over and over again. I've tested one before, and 18 out of 20 IPs are on Yelp's blacklist. ipipgo has an exclusive advantage.Real-time update of thermal data, their crawler team is updating the available IP segments on a daily basis.

Yelp's account system is bound to IP, device and behavior, and once abnormalities occur, a red card will be issued immediately. It is recommended to use the visitor mode to collect, if you have to log in, remember to bind each account!Independent IP + independent browser environmentThe