Unblocking the Web with SOCKS5 Proxies – How Does it Work?

Experts forecast that over half the world’s education will be online by 2030. That’s billions of people creating terabytes of data regularly.

The web is nothing less than a goldmine for a business that relies on data-based decision-making. But how do you explore this treasure chest? Proxy servers come to mind.

A proxy server is an intermediary between your computer’s server and the destination server. Let’s say you want to collect data from www.ineedyourdata.com but want to keep the destination website from knowing it’s you.

So, you route your request through a proxy server, which masks your IP address to keep you anonymous. Sneaky, uh?

Today, there are many types of proxy servers, with SOCKS5 being one of the most widely used ones. Let’s discuss the use cases of these proxy servers and how they can benefit businesses and individual users.

What Are SOCKS5 Proxies?

To fully understand what SOCKS5 proxies are and how they work, you must know about SOCKS itself.

SOCKS stands for ‘socket secure.’ It’s an internet protocol that transports network packets back and forth between servers and clients.

Since SOCKS has a circuit-level session, it can forward any TCP or UDP traffic. In this way, it is versatile enough to support all routing tools.

SOCKS is commonly used to:

• Allow traffic to go through internet filtering to access blocked content (e.g., accessing websites a country or workplace many have blocked)
• Run the Tor Onion proxy software.
• Make a VPN functional to forward connections to the local network of a server.

That’s the information you need to know about SOCKS. So, where does SOCKS5 fit? It’s a more advanced version of SOCKS that offers better performance and features.

Here are two regards in which SOCKS5 is better than the previous versions, i.e., SOCKS4:

• Offers more authentication choices
• Provides support for UDP and IPv6 connections

Use Cases of SOCKS5 Proxies

Like any other proxy type, SOCKS5 proxies also have a ton of use cases. Let’s go through them one by one.

Web Scraping

Let’s say you’re creating a new lifestyle blog. You want to conduct a competitor analysis to see what famous bloggers in the space are posting.

Scenario 1: You search for top lifestyle blogs on Google. You click on every link on the first page. Then, you review every article those blogs have posted in the past year. You copy every web page manually and paste it into MS Word or Google Docs.

Scenario 2: You use SOCKS5 proxies to access URLs of your choice. The proxy server, combined with a web scraper, extracts all the necessary data and lets you save it on your computer in your desired format.

It’s clear which of the two methods is simpler and quicker. Web scraping, which refers to automatic data extraction from websites, is a basic need for any business today. Here are some of the use cases of web scraping:

• Conduct market analysis
• Generate leads
• Conduct research
• Check stock prices from different platforms
• Automate repetitive research tasks
• Conduct competitor analysis

Oxylabs.io proxies make web scraping a breeze because they let you send thousands of requests without getting instantly blocked.

Besides ensuring your anonymity, these proxies help you access geo-restricted websites, bypass anti-scraping systems, and improve the overall scraping performance.

Dynamic Pricing

Let us tell you the story of Marriott Hotels and how they’ve remained competitive despite fierce competition in the hotel industry. Marriott Hotels does something called dynamic pricing.

In simple words, it means a business changes its prices based on certain factors. These may be consumer sentiment, global conditions, weather, economic situation, etc.

Starwood Hotels, one of the names under Marriott Hotels, used dynamic pricing to adjust their room fares according to global economic and weather conditions. So much so that they would consider music concerts in Madison Square Garden, then check their competitors’ rates and change their prices accordingly.

These tactics increased the per-room revenue by 5%.

But what does this have to do with SOCKS5, you may ask? Well, you can use SOCKS5 proxies to collect pricing and economic data. They can also help you gauge consumer analysis by going through thousands of customer comments on hundreds of websites in no time.

Like Marriott Hotels, you can aggregate data from multiple sources and use it to make informed decisions. If you were to do this data collection manually, you wouldn’t be able to benefit from fast-changing market trends.

SEO Monitoring

As Neil Patel, the top SEO expert, says, “No website can stand without a strong backbone. And that backbone is technical SEO.” SOCKS5 proxies come to your aid when you need to monitor your SEO success.

SEO companies providing SERP analysis and keyword research services can also use SOCKS5 proxies. To get valuable insights, you can use these proxies to scrape all search engines, including Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, and others.

For example, is there a change in the search engine’s algorithm? What does link building look like?

SOCKS5 proxies can help you get answers to all these questions. In fact, you can get specialized SEO proxies with high bandwidth for continuous search engine scraping. SOCKS5 proxies can also help you test if your website can handle large traffic loads.

Multiple Social Media Accounts

Suppose you’re a restaurant chain with branches in 50 cities. You want to create different social media accounts for each branch. Most social media sites will flag you as a bot if you try to create multiple accounts on the same IP address. Enter SOCKS5 proxies!

With SOCKS5 proxies, you can create 50 or more accounts on multiple social media sites. Thanks to the SOCKS5 authentication system, you won’t have to worry about privacy either.

Remote Work Facilitation

You might have an office in Atlanta, USA, but half of your workforce is spread across the globe. Depending on their countries’ regulations, they may be unable to access some US websites.

But with SOCKS5 proxies, they can. These proxy servers let you access geo-restricted content by making it seem as if the request is coming from an IP address in that region.

Conclusion

The verdict is out: SOCKS5 proxies are a must-have for your business. From competitor analysis to ad verification, there’s a lot you can do with these proxies.

But here’s the catch; free proxies don’t work that well and usually pose serious privacy issues. They’re slow and unprotected. Instead, you should invest in reliable paid SOCKS5 proxies to scrape the web.

Having said that, web scraping is the most important use case of SOCKS5 proxies. As long as you have the URLs you want to scrape, you’re set to succeeed.