For some of our readers from Russia, it’s a new challenge to get to www.linkedin.com, which has been officially blocked in Russia.

On 4 August 2016, a Moscow court ruled that Linkedin must be blocked in Russia because it stores the user data of Russian citizens outside of the country, in violation of the new data retention law. The law requires all companies doing business in the country to store their users’ data locally.

So recently I had an opportunity to test the Bright Data’s proxy network (see the original post) in order to get Linkedin in Russia. I applied the Bright Data Chrome extension to make Linkedin available on my browser.

Register and create zones in Bright Data

With the help of my personal manager, I registered, installed Bright Data  Proxy Manager (or just PM) and was given access to both data center and residential proxies (you have to wait 3 working days to get approved for them though). I tried to apply both data center and residential proxies to reach Linkedin and failed. So my customer manager noted: use gIP proxies.

gIP proxies

For this target domain you need a special zone utilizing gIP. A gIP is a group of exclusive residential IPs that are assigned exclusively for a specific domain and not others, in this case Linkedin (you can also set exclusivity for other targets as well). Using gIPs ensures that nobody else uses the same IPs with the same target sites as you do and has a higher success rate then other IP types.

I created a gip_link zone choosing the gip proxies. In the Chrome extension I got that zone activated.

Now, as the Chrome extension was on, using the gip_link zone, I was able to navigate to the Linkedin site while from an IP registered in Russia.