IP addresses are digital identities connected to devices accessing the internet. They come in two formats, IPv4 and IPv6. Irrespective of your IP address format, they can be easily compromised. Your IP address makes it easy to track and target you with ads or cyber-attacks. This is because the addresses are static.
A way to solve the easy tracking and targeting is IP rotation. IP rotation is a trick that serves both individuals and businesses. But this piece will focus on businesses and how they maximize IP rotation.
What is IP rotation?
As the name implies, IP rotation involves randomly distributing IP addresses to a device at scheduled periods. IP rotation is not new, as internet service providers have been using it since it became obvious that IPv4 will not have enough IP addresses for global devices. Whenever users connect to the internet, they get IP addresses allocated to the device. Upon disconnecting, the IP address returns to the ISP’s address pool. Find more info in this blog article.
As a business owner, rotating IP address becomes important for marketing, security, research, etc. By setting up infrastructure for IP rotation, businesses can make numerous internet requests that destination websites and search engines may frown at.
While businesses can use IP rotation in legal value-generating cases, hackers can also leverage it to enhance their activities.
Why businesses need IP rotation
Businesses use IP rotation for several reasons. Here are ways businesses use it:
Data extraction
Data is core to decision-making for modern businesses, and the web stands as a source for massive data acquisition. However, most website owners have security infrastructures to prevent unsolicited data extraction. This is where IP rotation comes in for businesses. By rotating IP addresses, websites can maintain anonymity. Also, every request from the web scraper presents a new IP address to the web scraper. This makes it difficult for the server to flag traffic from the software.
Rather than targeting a single website for data, IP addresses can also aid with SERP scraping. Multiple requests are made to a search engine to generate content pages from different websites in this case. To protect website owners, search engines like Google also have bot-defense measures in place. You can avoid the blockages since your requests will be sent via different addresses.
Research
The content displayed varies based on the user’s IP address when conducting global research. When your IP is foreign to the target website, you may be served country-specific content, which may not provide the accurate data you need. Rotating IPs help you get the exact information you want without getting banned.
SEO
Search engine optimization efforts by businesses can be frustrating when results aren’t being generated. For SEO, one way to have quality results is to work with quality information. IP rotation can aid web scraping, which translates to better SEO results.
IP rotation can also aid in proper keyword research for each location a website has an audience. Learning about the right keywords will help your site optimize content, metadata, etc.
Competitor analysis
Collecting information with a company IP address may be counter-productive. The business world is cut-throat. Hence, you must know what your competitors are doing to climb or stay at the top. Hence, using rotated IP addresses lets you into your competitor’s world without breaking fair play rules.
You can make price comparisons, audience, web, and business model analysis, etc.
Security
Since IP rotation keeps switching online identities on behalf of the user, it becomes harder to monitor or trace your online activity. The inability to trace your activities makes it difficult for cybercriminals to have a clear shot at your system.
Traffic and lead generation
Harnessing IP rotation can improve your global localization strategy. This way, you can create localized content and pages for users not in your physical location. Reaching new people helps your lead generation.
Value-generating properties of IP rotation
The benefits that come with IP rotation are down to some properties of the concept, which include;
- IP pools: These are groups of reserved IP addresses used by users whenever they try to make internet requests on their browsers.
- Proxies: Proxies are intermediaries between a user and the destination server. A proxy replaces the IP address whenever a user makes an internet request.
- Datacenter and residential IPs are two major sources of IP addresses assigned to users whenever they use the proxy rotation service.
Importance of IP rotation in the future
Privacy is technically non-existent on the internet. Unfortunately, owing to the rate at which cybercrimes are being executed, IP rotation will soon become a common measure that the average internet user is familiar with.
Conclusion
As a business owner, IP rotation is one IT skill someone on your team should possess. You must recognize the advantage of IP rotation from security to marketing to competitiveness and even customer acquisition.
