Daniel - October 1, 2021
In this article, I’ll be explaining how to scrape data from Profile Canada.
Profilecanada.com is a popular online Canadian business directory with over 1 million companies listed. Each month, tens of thousands of individuals use the database to identify and contact businesses for their services.
As a business, Profile Canada can help increase your visibility of SERPs, especially that of Google. Since the directory has been online for a long time, Google considers ProfileCanada.com and the businesses listed there to be authority sites.
Interestingly, listing your business on Profile Canada is completely free. You only opt for the premium options if you need much higher visibility. Furthermore, listing your business on Profile Canada is simple in just 3-steps. After listing, your business will be live on the site in a matter of days.
In today’s business world, every single data is vital. How about a database that provides you with information about thousands of businesses in Canada? If you’re a marketer, agency, or business based in Canada or targeting Canadian clients, such a database is invaluable.
Web scraping is the best way to efficiently extract the business data you need from Profile Canada. You’ll have a hard time manually copying and pasting text from the website. While it’ll take your time, it also won’t be well organized compared to web scraping.
A scraping bot and a proxy are two essential tools for scraping data from Profile Canada. The crawling and scraping functions are both done by the web scraping bot. It crawls the Profile Canada database to find the category you’re looking for and then extracts the information.
You don’t have to create your own web scraping bot because there are several available on the internet. Furthermore, you don’t need to write codes to select the category you want to scrape. The best web scraping bots are usually designed for non-technical users.
However, your web scraping bot can easily get banned by anti-bot systems. Most cyber attackers use bots to start their attacks, therefore websites aren’t welcoming to them. Profile Canada may not only block your bot, the site can blacklist your IP address as well, making it impossible for you to access the database entirely.
Fortunately, you can solve all of these with the second tool, the proxy, is required. A proxy can hide your true IP address and prevent websites from blocking your bot. You get thousands and millions of IPs with proxies.
By rotating these IP addresses, you can keep Profile Canada from detecting and restricting your site scraping bot.
As explained above, you can’t scrape Profile Canada without proxies because your bot will always be blocked. You can pick between residential and datacenter proxies when it comes to selecting a proxy type. Both have advantages and disadvantages. However, residential proxies are more dependable.
The main reason is because they get their proxies from ISPs just like every regular internet user. On the other hand, datacenter proxies are from data centers which are usually private, virtual servers.
Nonetheless, where you purchase your proxies will determine if they are the best proxies for Profile Canada scraping. For example, you can buy a residential proxy from a shady proxy service and it won’t work even though residential proxies are very dependable.
I recommend purchasing your proxies from ProxyRack if you want the best. ProxyRack is a well-known proxy provider with residential and datacenter proxies available. Take a look the available options below:
Unmetered Residential Proxies: Starting from $80
Premium GEO Residential Proxies: Starting from $14.95
Private Residential Proxies: Starting from $99.95
USA Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Mixed Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Shared Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $49
Canada Rotating Proxies: Starting at $65
There you go! How to safely scrape data from ProfileCanada.