Web scraping is a technique for extracting targeted data from websites through the evaluation of the rendered front-end information and code. Webmasters can extract data manually, but the automated process of web scraping is faster, more efficient, and less prone to error. Scraping data does more than just acquire it – it enables data organization, analysis, archiving, and updating.
A scraper is an online tool that automatically performs the web scraping functionality to record the desired data from websites (typically for a fee) and puts it into a format the user can measure or analyze later.
A sitemap is a file that lists all the webpages of a site. Sitemaps are important for describing the organization of your site’s content to search engines. Submitting your sitemap to Google, for example, means it will be more effective for a site because it will crawl the site more intelligently, generally resulting in better search engine ranking results.
Sitemaps also provide valuable metadata about the pages, such as the date of the last page update and the relevance of the page in relation to other URLs on the site. Creating a sitemap is especially handy for sites that are large, those with pages that don’t link to one another, new sites, or sites that use rich media content.