SEO. Where high-quality counts
SEO with proxy servers is one of the most common uses. For the uninitiated, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation, which is:
The process of maximising the number of visitors to a website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
Using proxy servers for SEO mainly involves tracking the search engine ranking results for a site, checking and building backlinks and harvesting search result data to follow up on later.
How to use intelligently use proxy servers with SEO.
All sites are naturally averse to being scraped, to varying degrees. Too many requests in a short space of time from one IP address will quickly lead to the server becoming blocked. Search engines are a massive target for scraping and receive constant requests for the information they provide. To defend against being bombarded with scrapes, search engines have developed incredibly sophisticated algorithms to deter requests from bots and try and ensure that they only deliver results back to real users.
Those algorithms are regularly updated and if you want to read up on current best practice head over to our responsible scraping page. However, a reliable proxy server provider should be able to advise you how to optimise your software to scrape search engines with their services efficiently and effectively. It’s in the providers’ interest to help you avoid blocks; otherwise, there could be a negative impact on their server pool. That, in turn, could result in increased costs to them and cause problems for their other customers.
No matter which site you target, with all web scraping there is always one fundamental constant: you need to simulate requests from many different users. The only way you can do that is by using a large pool of IP addresses, rotating your queries through them and employing proper human emulation settings.
It’s also essential that you find a high-quality provider. If you use free or low-cost proxy servers, then those are very often blocked by the search engines due to past abuse.
Here’s a list of providers that are suitable for SEO. Just click on the provider for more details.
GeoSurf
Recommended For:
Those looking for an Enterprise level provider offering truly granular, city-level results.
GeoSurf’s residential IP addresses are excellent for use with SEO and proxy servers. Not only do they provide a high number of IP addresses, but you can select IPs right down to a considerable amount of over 1,700 cities.
On a technical level, GeoSurf offers unlimited connections and threads, and an API along with code examples in every common programming language. In addition to that, easy to use Chrome & Firefox extensions are also available.
Pros/Cons |
Pricing |
Locations |
Support |
Pros/Cons |
Pros
- 2 million+ residential IP addresses which should be enough for the vast majority of scraping tasks.
- Due to the volume of addresses and GeoSurf’s proxy masking, they claim their addresses are undetectable.
- Unlimited parallel requests are available through their network. The full pool of IP addresses worldwide is accessible without any limits.
- Statistics are available to help customers monitor and optimise their data collection techniques.
- Residential IP’s in 130+ countries
- Dedicated Support Agent
Cons
- SOCKS servers not available. Only HTTP/s is on offer.
- Higher than average entry cost.
Pricing |
$450 /month
- 38GB Included
- $12 per GB
$900 /month
- 90GB Included
- $10.00 per GB
$2,000 /month
- 250GB Included
- $8.00 per GB
- Unlimited Access IPs
$Custom /month
- 2TB Included
- 2 Million IPs available
- Dedicated Pool of IPs
- Unlimited Connections
Locations |
Residential
- 130+ locations including the US, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Thailand.
- 1,700+ cities.
Support |
- Premium support via email, phone and Skype is available from a designated support agent with all plans.
- Developer friendly code examples offered.
SmartProxy
Recommended For:
Those targeting SERPs and localised results from all over the globe at a very reasonable cost.
Although relatively new to the proxy server market, not entering until 2018, SmartProxy landed with a splash.
Part of their success is down to providing a vast number of over 10 million residential IP addresses in almost 200 locations. But SmartProxy also recognises that the integrity of their network is just as, if not more important than the number of IP addresses they can provide.
When it comes to SEO with proxy servers, the bar is high as search engines quickly block entire classes on a whim. Fortunately, SmartProxy’s network not only consists of ‘clean’ IP addresses, but they handle their IP addresses intelligently to prevent blocks.
Add to that their low entry point and a limitless number of concurrent connections, and you can see why SmartProxy offer excellent value.
Pros/Cons |
Pricing |
Locations |
Support |
Pros/Cons |
Pros
- Low entry point: $75 minimum commitment for residential addresses.
- Unlimited concurrent connections offer very high-speed scraping, which can hugely accelerate reporting.
- Residential IP addresses are those of genuine devices, making queries extremely difficult to detect.
- Desktop and mobile IP addresses are available.
- SmartProxy claim a 27% speed increase over competitors.
- Chrome extension available.
- 24/7 support
- Manage users, projects and limits through an easy to use proxy dashboard.
- 3-day money-back guarantees offered.
Cons
- No SOCKS5 support.
Pricing |
$75 /month
- 5GB Included
- $15.00 per additional GB
- 1 Sub-user
- 2 Whitelist limit
$200 /month
- 20GB Included
- $10.00 per additional GB
- 3 Sub-users
- 10 Whitelist limit
$400 /month
- 50GB Included
- $8.00 per additional GB
- 5 Sub-users
- 20 Whitelist limit
$600 /month
- 100GB Included
- $6.00 per additional GB
- 10 Sub-users
- 50 Whitelist limit
Unlimited Connections
10M+ IPs/195+ location
10 min. sticky session
3 Day Guarantee (Except BTC)
Locations |
- 10 million+ IP addresses available in every country across the globe with the option to select IP’s from specific countries.
- 8 major cities are also available.
Support |
24/7 support via email and live chat.
NetNut
Recommended For:
Those looking for a high-speed, high-quality service but have the budget to match
Another newcomer to the market is NetNut. Their main selling point is an advanced DiViNetwork.
What’s unique about this network is that it utilises IP addresses sourced directly from over 100 ISPs worldwide. On paper, this makes them perfect for SEO use with their proxy servers.
NetNut completely controls these so they can shape your traffic, load balance your queries and ensure a guaranteed quality of service. NetNut can manage 100’s of Gigabits per second of network traffic, so they are well-used to maintaining a very high-speed network.
As no other parties are involved, this makes their network more secure than their competitors. NetNut can also guarantee no disconnections or interruptions.
As you’d expect, a dashboard and API is available to check your statistics and usage in real-time.
Pros/Cons |
Pricing |
Locations |
Support |
Pros/Cons |
Pros
- 7 Day trial
- High speeds service: No bottleneck caused by end-users’ devices.
- Guaranteed quality of service.
- Very Secure. All traffic is routed exclusively through NetNut’s network, and they do not utilise any third-party devices.
- A dedicated account manager.
- Full integration support available if required.
- Direct ISP connectivity provides 24/7 IP availability. Keep your web sessions for as long as you need with Static Residential IPs.
- Proxies are integrated seamlessly and rotated into each browser session by default.
- Ensure high speed, high success rates with optimised dedicated private IP pools.
- Gather any data from any site.
- API and dashboard are available to retrieve data statistics.
Cons
- Only have a pool of around 500k IP addresses, which is much smaller than their competition, but could well be enough to handle many projects.
- Fifty countries available is comparatively small, but they cover every continent.
- No whitelisting. Only offer username:password authentication.
- No SOCKS5 support.
- Support is quite limited.
Pricing |
$300 /month
- 20GB Included
- $15.00 per GB
$475 /month
- 50GB Included
- $9.50 per GB
$700 /month
- 100GB Included
- $7.00 per GB
$1,250 /month
- 250GB Included
- $5.00 per GB
$3,500 /month
- 1TB Included
- $3.50 per GB
$Custom /month
- 10TB Included
- $Custom per GB
Add info
Add info
Locations |
Support |
Oxylabs
Recommended For:
Those looking for a heavy-duty, powerful data extraction and collection tool.
Unlike most other providers, Oxylabs use a system called the ‘Real-Time Crawler’. The claim is that this is “the most powerful heavy-duty data extraction tool on the web, effortlessly capturing data from search engines.”
Oxylabs state that this is unique and handles the most defensive sites, so it’s perfect for scraping Google.
Thanks to this, Oxylabs promise a 100% success rate with zero blocks and also includes a captcha solver. On top of that, it’s simple to integrate through their API with all locations are available. What more do you need?
Pros/Cons |
Pricing |
Locations |
Support |
Pros/Cons |
Pros
- 100% success rate guaranteed.
- Guaranteed results from the most difficult to scrape sites.
- Highly customizable, user-friendly and flexible web data collection tool.
- Highly scalable.
- Captcha solving included.
- Simple API integration and as straightforward as using IPs.
- Guaranteed results even from the most challenging data sources.
- Global coverage.
Cons
- High entry point means Oxylabs aren’t recommended for small businesses or low volume requests
Pricing |
$400 /month
- 100K pages
- $4 per 1K pages
- 100% success rate
$2,000 /month
- 1M pages
- $2 per 1K pages
- 100% success rate
$50,000 /month
- 100M pages
- $0.50 per 1K pages
- 100% success rate
$150,000 /month
- 500M pages
- $0.30 per 1K pages
- 100% success rate
Add info
Add info
Locations |
Oxylabs state every location is available.
Support |
- Dedicated account manager.
- 24/7 live support.
- Advice on target scraping.
- Quarterly web scraping analysis.
- 7 day free trial for companies.
- 3 day money-back guarantee for individuals.