Jipingmi.com China Real Estate Search Engine Launches English Version

Jipingmi  Vizion Interactive Reading Time: 3 minutes

Jipingmi, the leading real estate search engine in China, has launched an English version. The English version of this real estate search engine, located at English.jipingmi.com, collects property listings from several different property listing sources that are in English and organizes the data into one search platform.

Jipingmi’s crawler currently aggregates over two million real estate property listings from more than 100 real estate websites in 21 cities in China. They have over 5,000,000 page views a month and boast 180,000 registered users.

Jipingmi Search Engine

Looking at the search results, there is still a fair amount of Chinese still included in the search results, but since the data is generally aggregated from many other sources, I can see how it would be helpful. What’s interesting is that although this is primarily in English, some of the Google AdSense ads that loaded for me (I’m in Texas), Google still loaded ads in Chinese.

China Real Estate Search Engine

Although this primarily is in English, I noticed on their page that there is not any language meta tag on the page to indicate that the page (or the subdomain) is in English. I could easily see a search engine mistaking this page for another language (it happens all the time). So, what would be helpful is if the following meta tag be put on the pages that are in English:

< meta http-equiv=” content-language ” content=” en”>

Generally speaking, if your site is in another language (any language other than in English), and you add a page or pages to your web site that are in English, you will want to use the language tag to tell the search engines that the page is in English. You can use the ‘language’ meta tag on pages that are in a language other than the web site’s primary one.

When reviewing the language details and how Google is dealing with this site being in another language (the English version is supposed to be located at http://english.jipingmi.com), there are other issues that should be fixed; title tags on pages are not unique, the meta description and the meta keywords tags are not optimized to their fullest, and there appears to be another sub- of a subdomain being indexed, which may be revealing some duplicate content issues. I have a screen capture of the Google search results for a site: command at Google: site:english.jipingmi.com

China Real Estate Search Engine

Jipingmi is Mandarin for “How many square meters?” or “A few square meters” and was launched in late 2007. It quickly became on of the premier real estate search engines in China. The English version currently focuses on Beijing, China and, for Beijing 2008 Olympics, is trying to promote the search engine’s use for the finding of short-term rentals. According estimates, around 500,000 foreigners will stay in Beijing during the Olympics.

With the 2008 Olympics being hosted in the area this year, I would imagine that there should be a lot of demand for an English version of the site. I searched for several apartments and found that there are many nice ones available; the only suggestion I have is that I would love to be able to see photos!