LinkedIn isn't letting me Google users anymore - "sentinel_org_block"

Question

Not sure if this is related to recent belt-tightening of the LinkedIn api (and perhaps not the correct Stack place to be posting this), but I'm having a weird error when using LinkedIn from my server.

I know they're really locking down on "web scrapers" (which I am not doing with their site). What my site does is simply lets you click on a name and performs a google search.

Clicking John Doe who works for Acme Corp redirects you to Google, for a search of "John Doe Acme Corp LinkedIn" which usually provides the correct user's profile in the first result. Huzzah!

However, when I click on that result, I get an error page. In fact, when I click on ANY LinkedIn Google Search result (even if I google it organically) I get redirected to a "page not found" result.

All of the error pages have /uas/login?trk=sentinel_org_block in them.

Any idea what's happening here? Surely LinkedIn isn't blocking me from simply Googling people?

Answer 1

The "sentinel_org_block" indicates that your request was blocked due to anti-scraping throttling on your IP address. Take a look at the lawsuit that LinkedIn filed against 100 anonymous scrapers. On page 4, Line 25 there's a reference to their "sentinel" system and page 5, line 1 a reference to the "org block" system (hence "sentinel_org_block").

Based on the above and my personal experience, I believe LinkedIn has a daily limit on the number of public profile views for a given ISP.

I'm building an interactive resume that scrapes my public LinkedIn profile for my current positions and populates the dashboard automatically. While I was testing the ETL script, I did numerous calls to the public profile page, and after about 50-100 calls, the page stopped working - it would redirect to the LinkedIn sign-up page instead.

The interesting thing is that it seemed to block any IP address from my ISP (I asked a few friends on the same ISP to try to the load the page and they had the same issue). When I asked a friend on another ISP it worked fine.

The goods news is that this is a temporary block. Based on prior experience it appears to lift after 24 hours.