The scope of parsing can be reuce to two purposes:
- analysis of competitors in order to better understand how they work and borrow some approaches from them;
- analysis of your own site to eliminate errors, quickly implement changes, etc.
We regularly use the parser for the Ringostat blog. For example, when you nee to find images for which, for some reason, the Alt attribute is not registered. Search engines consider this a mistake and may downgrade the site that has a lot of such illustrations in the search results. It’s even scary to imagine how much time it would take to manually search for such pictures. And thanks to the parser, we get a list with links in a few minutes.
Ways to use parsing
Now let’s look at what other purposes parsing can be use for.
- Market Research . Parsing allows you to quickly assess what products and prices competitors have.
- Analysis of the dynamics of change . Parsing can be done regularly to evaluate how some indicators have change. For example, prices rose or fell, the number of online ads or forum posts change.
- . Detect errors in meta tags, broken links, reirect issues, duplicate elements, etc.
- Collection of links leading to your site. contractor. How to check external links and what tools to do this is describe in detail in the article . An example Canada Email List of such a report:
- Filling the catalog of the online store. Usually such sites have a huge number of positions and it takes a lot of time to write a description for all products. To simplify this process, foreign stores often parse and simply translate product information.
Eliminate Bugs On Your Own Resource
- Building a client base. In this case, contact data is parsd, for example, social network users, forum participants, etc. But here it is worth remembering that collecting information that is not publicly available is illegal.
- Gathering feeback and comments on forums and social networks.
- Creating content that is base on a selection of data . For example, sports scores, infographics on price changes, weather, etc.
By the way, unscrupulous people can use parsers for DDOS attacks. If you start parsing hundreds of pages of the site at the same time, then the site can be “laid down” for a while. This, of course, is illegal – more on this below. You can protect yourself from such attacks if protection is installed on the server.