Rotating proxies are becoming essential. This can appear as too bold a statement to make. Rotating proxies have been used in very specific niches so far. But it appears that their use case has extended beyond the initial one. Still, an essential?
“How can some remote server that assigns you a new IP address for every connection be so important?” you may be wondering. This is not a question that comes with a short answer. However, if you are interested in learning a thing or two about rotating proxies, you are in the right place. We will show you why they are so important and list their most common use cases.
Application in Social Media Marketing
Almost half of the population has an account on social media, thus making social media marketing a powerful tool. Since every business wants to capture more leads, boosts sales, and grow, the competition on social media is very harsh.
Using multiple accounts, consistently posting and replying to followers helps businesses grow a substantial following. To do this, they need to slightly bend the rules and use multiple social media accounts on the same social media platform. This is against Terms of Use of most platforms.
Rotating proxies resolve this by changing the IP automatically and tricking the social platform servers into thinking that the connection originates from a different location.
Application in Content Restriction
Have you ever heard of geo-based IP restrictions? It is not widespread, but there are still many websites that lock their content behind this type of restriction. Anyone who tries to access it is blocked. There is a way to bypass it, though. Selecting proxies that have IP addresses outside of the geo-restricted area in their pool goes around the geo-based block and enables access to these websites.
Whether you want to watch a film or a TV show, access some blog, or access geo-blocked content for whatever reason, rotating proxy will help. On top of that, since it will use different IPs for every new connection, you will be safe from getting banned.
Application In Web Scraping & Crawling
Both web scraping and crawling are labeled as invasive techniques by many websites. Web crawling goes through websites and indexes information, while web scraping extracts information from the web. Both techniques are widely used by businesses to identify trends in the industry and markets and get ready for new challenges.
However, websites have a way of sniffing out the crawling bots and scraper tools and banning the IP they connect from. Rotating proxies are commonly used in web scraping and crawling. The idea is simple, bots, and scraper tools use different IPs to go through the web; the chances of getting banned on websites are minimal to none.
The only thing rotating proxies can’t bypass is a “disallow” command for a specific bot in robots.txt.
Application in SEO
SEO is a vital process for many online businesses, just like social media marketing. Doing keyword research, rank tracking, technical optimization, and competitor analysis are the pillars of any successful SEO strategy. A great tool for this is keyword.com they have accurate keyword rank tracking and competitor insights to outsmart even the smartest SEOs. Here is a keyword.com review for more information. To identify what has to be optimized and improved SEO agencies have to do site audits.
Site audits are also commonly performed on competitors’ websites to discover what they are doing to be ranked first. A site audit is just a fancy name for the usual suspects – web scraping and crawling. Doing it consistently will result in an IP block. How come? A website has many pages, and to go through all of them, the software has to send hundreds of requests to a server.
The solution is, of course, a rotating proxy. A new IP address for every request ensures that site audits are complete no matter how many pages have to be scrapped and crawled through.
Application in Traffic Balancing
Making hundreds of requests via one server is not efficient network usage. It will most definitely result in big latency and poor bandwidth. This significantly affects the workflow of business that depend on information gathered by bots.
This is where traffic balancing comes into play. Distributing requests across a wide network of servers promotes efficient use of network bandwidth and significantly reduces latency. Rotating proxies fit well as a solution. Users can distribute requests manually or let the software handle it for them automatically, thus achieving the most optimal traffic balance and fast speeds.
Conclusion
It appears that rotating proxies are tackling the challenges for both businesses and individuals. They are used in different verticals preventing IP blocks, bypassing geo-based IP restrictions, optimizing traffic balance, and streamlining web scraping and crawling processes. It’s safe to assume that rotating proxies are going to become even more popular than they are today.