HTTP 403 Responses when using Python Scrapy

Question

I am using Python.org version 2.7 64 bit on Windows Vista 64 bit. I have been testing the following Scrapy code to recursively scrape all the pages at the site www.whoscored.com, which is for football statistics:

from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.sgml import SgmlLinkExtractor
from scrapy.selector import Selector
from scrapy.item import Item
from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy import log
from scrapy.cmdline import execute
from scrapy.utils.markup import remove_tags


class ExampleSpider(CrawlSpider):
    name = "goal3"
    allowed_domains = ["whoscored.com"]
    start_urls = ["http://www.whoscored.com/"]
    rules = [Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(allow=()), 
                  follow=True),
             Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(allow=()), callback='parse_item')
    ]
    def parse_item(self,response):
        self.log('A response from %s just arrived!' % response.url)
        scripts = response.selector.xpath("normalize-space(//title)")
        for scripts in scripts:
            body = response.xpath('//p').extract()
            body2 = "".join(body)
            print remove_tags(body2).encode('utf-8')  


execute(['scrapy','crawl','goal3'])

The code is executing without any errors, however of the 4623 pages scraped, 217 got a HTTP response code of 200, 2 got a code of 302 and 4404 got a 403 response. Can anyone see anything immediately obvious in the code as to why this might be? Could this be an anti Scraping measure from the site? Is it usual practice to slow the number of submissions made to stop this happening?

Thanks

Answer 1

HTTP Status Code 403 definitely means Forbidden / Access Denied.
HTTP Status Code 302 is for redirection of requests. No need to worry about them.
Nothing seems to be wrong in your code.

Yes, it's definitely an anti-scraping measure implemented by the site.

Refer these guidelines from Scrapy Docs: Avoid Getting Banned

Also, you should consider pausing and resuming crawls.