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Daniel - September 10, 2020
What Are The Best Proxies For Linkedin?
In this post, we will answer the question – what are the best proxies for LinkedIn?
For career people and business professionals, LinkedIn is the go-to social media platform. It provides a platform for professionals to connect, network, source, and support one another. In fact, the platform has recorded more than 65 million users since its launch in 2002.
If you want to get massive data from LinkedIn such as usernames, email addresses, websites, skills, industries, etc. of multiple users, you have to ‘scrape’ the platform. Unless you want to open and browse through each profile one after the other – it will take you days to finish.
For safe web scraping, you need a proxy to scrape data from LinkedIn. Therefore, in this post, we will be looking at the best proxies for LinkedIn.
What Type Of Proxies Work Best For Scraping Linkedin?
Residential Proxies
Residential proxies are the best proxies for scraping LinkedIn. These types of proxies make use of a residential IP address like the type provided by an Internet Service provider (ISP). As a result, a residential proxy uses an IP address that reflects an actual location. However, that location is not your real location.
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If you want to scrape LinkedIn, you need to do so anonymously, i.e. without giving up your actual IP address. This is why residential proxies are the best. Rather than using any random IP from data centers which may not point to any location, they use real IP addresses. That way, you are not at risk of being banned when you access LinkedIn.
However, in some cases, you might not be able to scrape too much at a time, say one minute, using the same IP address. You might get banned if you send too many requests from the same IP address. To avoid this, you should opt for a rotating residential proxy.
Basically, proxy rotation is merely switching between several proxies in a proxy pool. This is similar to what your ISP’s do (IP rotation), so you do not access the internet with the same IP address all the time. A rotating residential proxy switches your proxy with every session, and each proxy in the pool has a residential IP address.
So, as you access LinkedIn to scrape, your IP address will be continuously switched as proxies are rotated. You can scrape as much as you want and although you may be sending too many requests, you won’t get a ban since your traffic won’t emanate from one IP address.
This begs another question, what rotating residential proxy should I use? Well, there are several free residential proxy services; however, for LinkedIn scraping, it is best to use a premium proxy service from a renowned proxy service provider. The last thing you want is to get identified as you scrape and you can only rely on a trusted proxy provider like ProxyRack for that.
ProxyRack Proxies
ProxyRack is a renowned proxy service provider with a daily average of 600,000 unique proxies. It is a proxy network you can use irrespective of what part of the world you are located. There are residential proxies and rotating residential proxies available which serve over 800 million API requests daily.
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With a ProxyRack subscription, the last thing you would do is to worry about repeating the same IP address when you scrape LinkedIn. Now and then, new IP addresses are added to their proxy network. Their proxy network supports HTTP & SOCKS protocols. Specifically, it supports HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4, SOCKS4A, and SOCKS5 protocols.
If you choose to go with a ProxyRack rotating residential proxy, you can still carry out extensive data scraping with ProxyRack residential IP addresses. This is because the proxies are long proxies with sticky IP sessions so you can send so many requests.
Additionally, the ProxyRack proxy network has IP addresses from over 140 countries, and more are added every day. So, you are sure to find residential proxies for any location of your choice. Also, if you ever run into any issue, there is on-hand real technical support to help you. All you have to do is contact the support team.
Why Do People Scrape Linkedin?
In general, people scrape websites and online platforms to extra data. This data can be used for any purpose; it could be for analysis or business intelligence.
For LinkedIn, the number one reason why people scrape the platform is to get employers and employees data, i.e. companies and individuals.
Take, for instance, if you are a top company executive and you’re looking to identify skilled individuals that can work with you. It will be difficult to manually scrape the platform by visiting each individual LinkedIn page one after the other to copy their profile data – no one does that.
By scraping the platform for workers under your industry, you can get the profile data of every potential worker registered on LinkedIn at a time.
However, web scraping always involves the use of bots, and a lot of websites or social media platforms are against bot access. In fact, LinkedIn is one of them.
What Does LinkedIn Say About Scraping?
As a top social media platform, LinkedIn is stringent in protecting their users’ data. In fact, the use of bots, crawlers, plugins, or the likes to scrape or modify data on LinkedIn is not permitted.
What this implies is that it will be termed “illegal” if you try to scrape data off LinkedIn using a proxy. Before you register a LinkedIn account, it is included in their User Agreement that you will not engage in such scraping activities. Although this has been argued as not everyone who scrapes data off the platform has illicit intentions.
In 2019, LinkedIn scraping was ruled to be legal by a court following the block by LinkedIn on hiQ from scraping the platform. When LinkedIn is scraped, bots can only download publicly available data which can be viewed and accessed by others.
However, the ruling didn’t change LinkedIn’s stand against scraping. If your LinkedIn account is detected to be involved in such, you are likely to get your account shut down or restricted at least. LinkedIn could also take you to court as they have done several times in the past.
So, if you are going to scrape data off LinkedIn, you have to be very cautious. The platform is against it, and doing so is synonymous to breaking their rules, and you don’t want to get caught.
Thankfully, with ProxyRack’s proxies, you don’t have to worry about your identity being leaked or your connection being flagged. Combine ProxyRack’s proxies with a reliable LinkedIn scraping bot, and you’re good to go.
Unless you’re a programmer that has developed a LinkedIn scraping bot, check out the best LinkedIn scrapers you can use.
Best LinkedIn Scrapers
1. LIX – LinkedIn Search eXporter
This tool is a data scraper and extractor for LinkedIn. You can use it on any device or browser, and it’s an online tool so you won’t need to download or install it.
Conversely, LIX has been used by over 11,000 customers to scrape over 11,000 search results. With LIX, you simply have to run a search after which you can export all search results. You can download 100s of search results at a time.
2. FollowingLike
FollowingLike is a social management tool for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, etc. Hence, it is more than a LinkedIn scraper.
With FollowingLike, you can search LinkedIn by companies, posts, educational institutions, emails, likes, skills, and more. Also, you can export the search results.
You can use multiple LinkedIn accounts to scrape data as the tool features an Account Manager that supports this. Also, you can get statistics of accounts with FollowingLike. Not to mention, it has native support for proxies.
3. Webscrapper
This is a popular scraping extension on the internet with more than 350,000 users. You can use it to extract data from any website or platform, and LinkedIn is not exempted.
With a point and click interface, the Webscrapper tool is straightforward to use. You just need to install its extension on the Google Chrome browser and then navigate to the LinkedIn website to start scraping.
The scraped data can be exported in JSON or as CSV or XLSX files. Webscrapper also supports cloud scraping.
4. Scrabin
The Scrabin tool is ideal for LinkedIn lead generation, account management, and outbound marketing.
As you search for LinkedIn leads using Scrabin, there are several filters to get the right ones. Then, you can download the search results into a CSV file or export them to a third-Party CRM.
Scrabin is available to use as a web app, or you can download and install the extension on Google Chrome.
5. Octoparse
Octoparse is an intelligent web scraping tool. It takes just three steps to extract data; you find the data, select it, and export.
You have multiple options of exporting scraped data; you can save them as CSV, XLSX, or store them to a different platform using its API keys.
With Octoparse, you might not need a proxy as the scraper can rotate IP addresses.
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Summary
Conclusively, we have answered the question – what are the best proxies for LinkedIn?
Although LinkedIn does not support scraping, there are several reasons to scrape the platform. One reason is to get essential business data, as mentioned earlier. Such data can be valuable to end-users in their various industries if used judiciously.
Here, we have discussed the best proxies for LinkedIn and recommended that you use ProxyRack residential rotating proxies.
If you’re going to use these proxies and scrapers to scrape data from LinkedIn, make sure that it is for a good reason. We are against using proxies and scrapers for illicit activities. Besides, since LinkedIn is against scraping, you could be in trouble if caught.
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