A quick guide on how to scrape blog posts
Blogging has become an essential part of any comprehensive content marketing campaign. It is common knowledge that publishing more blogs regularly gives your customers a reason to return to your website more often.
This generates a lot of data for companies to analyze and identify emerging trends, hot topics, competitive SEO keywords, and much more actionable insight. To scrape blog posts, basically entails extracting blog data can really create endless opportunities for your business.
What are the benefits of blog scraping?
Why do businesses scrape blog posts? There are several reasons, some of which we already mentioned above. In general, blog scrapers are a great way to monitor your industry and your competitors, as well as to look for any mentions of your own brand, products, and services.
It's a tool and a technique that organizations of all sizes can use, giving growing businesses a way to create detailed databases that can guide future marketing decisions, as well as provide inspiration for your editorial content.
And because blog posts usually have a date of publication, you benefit from chronological context for your data - you not only get a snapshot of what people are saying right now, but you can also see how new topics have developed and what's no longer relevant when you scrape blog posts.
When it comes to how to scrape blogs, there are several options, from professional blog scraper services, such as those provided by Zyte, to semi-automated blog scrapers for DIY website data extraction, to the 'long way round' of manually copying and pasting content.
Manual extraction (copy and paste)
The most time-consuming method to scrape blog posts is to manually visit each page or post, and copy and paste the required content into a document or database located on your own computer or in the cloud.
As well as taking the most time and effort, this method also yields the worst results. You may be left with incomplete data, unwanted page elements such as advertisements, and a variety of other clutter copied over from the page headers.
Blog scraping tools resolve these issues, accelerating the process while also delivering better results - so what are the options?
DIY blog scraping tools
Website data extraction tools can enable a better result if you want to go down the DIY route. There are loads of open-source and commercial DIY blog scraping tools available if you want a blog scraper that you can use yourself.
With tools like Zyte Automatic Extraction, you can expect clean, structured data when you scrape blog posts. However, there is still considerable time and effort involved in carrying out a large-scale blog scraping campaign single-handedly.
Professional blog scraping services
Zyte's scraping service gives you fully managed web data extraction so that you face the least demand on your time and attention. You get a comprehensive database of page content in a format that suits you - typically CSV, JSON, JSONLines, or XML.
You can get structured data, free from clutter, with large-scale blog scraping campaigns completed quickly and accurately. It's the best way to get everything you need with the minimum fuss.
What to watch out for
When you scrape blog posts, you should always be cautious of the legal risks associated with actions such as:
- Scraping confidential content
- Scraping personal data
- Scraping content from behind an authorized login page in violation of that site’s terms and conditions
- Copyright infringement
If you partner with Zyte for your data extraction projects, our developers and legal team will assess the scope of your project and provide feedback if we identify any potential areas of concern before we undertake any data extraction.
If you want assistance with your specific situation, then you may want to consult a lawyer.
What can I do after I scrape blog posts content?
Editorial content generated after you scrape blog posts can provide a range of useful data. In some cases, this can be quantified — for example by aggregating review scores to see which products and services are well received, and which need some improvement.
You can also use scraped blog content to drive your editorial agenda as long as you are mindful of possible copyright issues.
You can take inspiration from the collated content, to create detailed, unique pages that address popular trending topics, giving your blog the best chance to rank highly in the Google Search results for your target SEO keywords.
Other uses for a database to scrape blog posts:
- See posts by specific authors across one or more websites
- Search and filter data in ways the blog/website does not allow
- Look for positive/negative sentiment and accuracy in news reports
If you need to focus on news content, in particular, Zyte's News Scraping API is the best option, as it's designed specifically to extract and process news articles. This can help you go beyond the need to scrape blog posts.
To find out more about how Zyte's data extraction services and tools can help you achieve the best results from your blog scraping campaign, get in touch today and tell us about your project, and we will contact you to discuss the best way to proceed.