Is web scraping using Python legal?

Are you anonymous when web scraping?

Are you in a different location than the web pages you are scraping?

Maybe you're using a different browser to gather information. All of these factors could impact your results. You can make sure you are scraping correctly by looking at the source and the links when you are on the page. If the content is on a different domain, you can also do a web search on the words you found in the source.

Do You Have What It Takes To Write a Great Article? You can improve your chances of being listed in Google and driving more traffic to your site if you have a quality content as your main resource. Your articles should: Contain a minimum of 1,000 words. Have bullet points. Be structured. Stick to an agreed upon outline or topic. If you've written any of the above articles in the past, then you might be able to use them as templates to create new ones. Are You Listed On High PR Sites? It's always a good idea to submit your articles to be reviewed on high PR websites. These sites won't all get the article up at the same time, but will each put your article on their site for 24 hours.

You can also find websites that regularly link out to your articles and use that to your advantage. You might even have an article on a website that is not indexed by Google. You can ask the editor to link out to the homepage of your website. It helps if they don't really need the article or they need to use some of the content from your article. It's a win-win!

Does Your Content Include The Hottest Topics? There are certain keywords that everyone is searching for and when you start your article with those keywords, you will be found more easily by the search engines. Here are some examples of words that everyone is searching for: How To. Cheat Sheet. Free. Ebook. Tutorial. Free Sample. For instance, how to cheat sheet gets you indexed fairly quickly. Free ebook cheat sheet does not get you as much exposure as it should.

Do You Have A Strong Authority Website?

Can you get banned for web scraping?

Is it OK to web scrape? (and is web scraping safe). This is a very broad question with many possible answers and it has been asked a lot. A lot of times, if you want to use a website in an automated way, it may not be "legal", but then so are just about every service on the internet.

However, there are some key areas where web scraping is definitely banned, for obvious reasons. For example, most federal government sites don't allow web scraping for security reasons. And if you are scraping for financial or sensitive data that could put you in a bad spot (eg, banks, credit card companies, health insurance websites, stock market).

In addition to that, a lot of websites will ban any sort of mass scraping. One example is this one (it has changed over the years), though there are several others. This one does a very nice job of explaining that.

Is scraping Zillow legal?

What are people using it for?

In early 2023, Zillow changed their API TOS to prohibit scraping the site. You can still use their public-facing data through the site, but you cannot scrape the data without paying them a fairly significant amount of money. This post documents my journey through trying to figure out if what I'm doing is legal and what other's have done with Zillow data. (Yes, there is probably more than one answer to this question.)

I'm mostly concerned about whether what I'm doing is going to get me sued. (And while I do not know for certain, I suspect that it is.) I'm also hoping that the information will help someone somewhere else by providing some guidelines about what they can and cannot do in Zillow data.

Please read the TOS on Zillow's Developer site. These documents are pretty easy to find by searching for "TOS" or "developer" in Google, or "api developer" on Zillow's Developer page. There's nothing particularly difficult about using any of these APIs. However, they make clear (to me at least) how they feel about their data being used outside the confines of their site, and the level of service and support that they are willing to provide.

Also note, that the TOS does not apply to public-facing data. These data are all available to the general public in various ways. And if you ask for it, Zillow can, and will share public data with you if they want to.

What this post is not about: I am not a lawyer or a technical expert. The following information is simply what I found and what other people have found through their own research, and what I learned through the process of trying to use the Zillow API.

The general idea of scraping. If you haven't had a chance to look at the Zillow developer website, here is a screenshot of what you will see when you open the link. When I open the "Getting Started" section on the top left, the only mention of scraping is a few lines at the bottom: Scraping may result in copyright issues if one of the items scraped from zillow.com is copyright protected or subject to a third-party license requiring that you obtain the owner's consent prior to scraping.