Web scraping is a crucial tool in SEO, used for auditing websites, in programmatic SEO and for providing context to web analytics. WordLift, a company specializing in structured data and improving content knowledge graphs, relies heavily on web scraping to handle missing and messy data.
The article discusses the use of OpenAI function calling to extract structured data from web pages. This is viewed as potentially transformative for those seeking to merge Large Language Models (LLMs) with Knowledge Graphs (KGs), a burgeoning trend in tech. Using a Colab Notebook, you can extract entity attributes from a list of URLs. However, the application of LLMs in web scraping is costly and slow, demanding streamlining. Following data extraction, it’s imperative to check and validate the data to guarantee its reliability and accuracy.
The article also introduces ScrapeGraphAI, a new Python library designed for AI scraping. By exploiting LLM and direct graph logic, ScrapeGraphAI constructs scraping pipelines for websites and different document types. ScrapeGraphAI appears to be a formidable tool, readily adapting to a variety of web pages. You input your OpenAI API key, provide the URL of the webpage you want to crawl, enter the scraping instructions, and press “Crawl”, ScrapeGraphAI then analyses the page based on your directions and exports a CSV file with the requested data.
However, the solution has limitations, including a clunky UI when fine-tuning rules and restricted ability to crawl multiple URLs. For scalable solutions, the author recommends Advertools, a renowned Python library developed by Elias Dabbas.
Web scraping is generally legal, although certain websites may have specific terms and conditions prohibiting scraping. Despite its legality, web scraping can consume significant bandwidth and computational resources, and should only be utilized when necessary. Further caution should be applied to ensure respect for others’ content and to avoid potential copyright infringements.
To further explain how to scrape data, the author refers to a Twitter thread by Antoine Eripret, who explores both free and paid options to extract content from a webpage. The focus of web scraping in SEO is to extract content for analysis, making it a crucial aspect in SEO strategy.
