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Crawl Architecture & Web Politeness Engineering

Ethical Scraping Policy &
Crawl Etiquette Standards

Web Extracto Pro is committed to benign, non-disruptive, and transparent web data harvesting. We engineer our autonomous crawlers to respect remote server capacity, adhere to robots exclusion standards, and prevent strain on third-party digital infrastructure.

Effective Date: January 15, 2024 • Compliance Standard: RFC 9309 (Robots Exclusion Protocol) • Policy Ref: ETH-SCR-2026.04
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Our Core Web Etiquette Principle

Automated data extraction must never degrade website performance, disrupt user experiences, or consume undue server bandwidth. Our distributed scraping cluster operates polite concurrency caps, intelligent backoff timers, and automated robots parsing.

01. Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt & Meta Directives)

Our crawlers evaluate target site governance directives prior to initiating extraction sessions. In accordance with RFC 9309:

  • Disallow Path Processing: URLs containing paths specifically prohibited by robots.txt for all user-agents or our specific bot identifiers are eliminated from our discovery queue before HTTP dispatch.
  • Crawl-Delay Adherence: When a target domain declares a Crawl-delay: <seconds> directive, our scheduler automatically spaces out successive requests to ensure compliance.
  • HTML Meta Directives: Pages containing <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> or HTTP response header X-Robots-Tag: noindex are stripped from extraction pipelines.

02. Politeness Throttling, Concurrency & Load Balancing

To eliminate server saturation risks, our platform applies hard architectural limits to every crawl job:

Per-Host Concurrency Caps

No target web host receives more than 1 to 5 simultaneous worker threads. Free trial accounts are hardcoded to a single concurrent thread.

Smart Request Pacing (RPM)

The platform enforces minimum delay intervals (typically 1,000ms–2,500ms) between page fetches on the same target domain to emulate human reading speeds.

Strict Depth Ceilings

Crawls are strictly bounded by configured Depth Limits (Level 2 for trials; maximum Level 8 for Enterprise), preventing runaway loop traversal.

03. User-Agent Transparency & Webmaster Identification

Our crawlers identify themselves truthfully and provide webmasters with direct contact links:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; WebExtractoPro-Bot/2.4; +https://webextracto.com/ethical-scraping)

Webmasters reviewing access logs can immediately trace our crawler traffic back to this documentation, review our operational standards, and initiate automated opt-out suppression.

04. Dynamic Backoff & Error Rate Circuit Breakers

If target servers show signs of load, Web Extracto Pro adopts immediate defensive backoff behaviors:

  • HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests): The crawler immediately quadruples the delay interval and backs off for a minimum of 60 seconds before retrying.
  • HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable): Requests to the host domain are temporarily halted to permit server recovery.
  • Latency Spike Detection: If server response time exceeds 2,500ms, the system downshifts concurrency to 1 thread automatically.
  • Persistent Error Abort: If consecutive errors exceed 15% of total scanned pages, the active session is terminated gracefully.

05. Universal Domain Blacklist & Webmaster Opt-Out

We maintain a centralized Universal Domain Blacklist. If you own or manage a domain and do not wish our platform to index publicly visible contact info:

Submit Domain Removal & Permanent Blacklist Request No legal threats or complex forms required. Verified domain owners are blacklisted within 24 hours.
Request Domain Removal →