Semalt Presents Automated Content Scraping Techniques To Ease Your Work

Content scraping is a practice of extracting useful information from the internet and publishing it on your own website. Various webmasters and writers take articles from established blogs and websites to grow their own businesses. Enterprises, programmers, and web developers also use different web scraping or content mining tools to get their works done. The most prominent content scraping techniques are mentioned below.

1: DOM Parsing

DOM or Document Object Model defines the style and structure of content within HTML and XML files. DOM parsers are used by programmers and developers to get in-depth views of different web pages. You can use DOM parser to extract web content with ease. XPath is a comprehensive tool to scrape desired websites and blogs and is compatible with Mozilla, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. With XPath, you can scrape the content of an entire or partial site without any need of programming skills.

2: HTML Parsing

HTML parsing is done with JavaScript. This content scraping technique is used to extract information from text documents and PDF files. It also gets you data from email addresses, nested links or other similar resources. HTML scraper is a good option for enterprises because it can parse HTML documents for you with ease and at high speed.

3: Vertical Aggregation

Vertical aggregation platform is created by developers with great computing skills. They target different tables and lists and harvest meaningful content as per their requirements. Some of them rely on Kimono Labs and other similar tools to get their work done. This technique will bring you benefits only if you use a number of crawlers and bots, and the quality of content measures the efficiency of these bots and crawlers.

4: Google Docs

Google spreadsheets are used as a powerful content scraping service. This technique is famous among scrapers. From the Google Docs, you can import desired files and get them scraped as per your requirements. Besides, you can regularly check and monitor the quality of content while it is being scraped.

5: XPath

XPath or XML Path Language is the query language that works on HTML and XML documents. Since these documents are based on a tree structure, XPath can be used for navigating through the selected web pages and helps check the quality of content. It gives a lot of benefits to webmasters in conjugation with HTML and DOM parsing, and the content can be published on your website instantly.

6: Text Pattern Matching

It is an expression-matching technique used by developers and programmers and clubbed with such languages as Ruby, Python, and Perl. You can implement this content scraping method to scrape a large number of sites fully or partially.

All these content scraping techniques ensure quality results, and there are tools like cURL, HTTrack, Node.js and Wget that were created to facilitate your work. You can extract as many or as little sites as you want.