When you’re looking through Russian search marketing forums or blogs, oftentimes you’ll come across the name Yasha (Яша).
Yasha is in a broad sense a slang name for the Yandex search engine, and in a narrow sense – Yandex.Catalog, from the URL of which the name originated (yaca.yandex.ru).
This directory is, in fact, a list of sites that have received official recognition from Yandex. Getting into Yasha allows you to achieve higher positions in Yandex due to the growth of the site’s trust, it also allows the webmaster to sell links from the site at a higher price.
To get to Yasha, you can follow one of two paths. First, you can try entering it for free. To do this, you need to check the site for compliance with Yandex requirements, create a description of the site, and submit an application. Key requirements include legal compliance, unique content, completeness of key pages, and absence of search spam. The description must also be created according to certain rules, the main of which is the brevity and conformity of the direction of the description to the main topic of the site.
However, Yasha directly says that after submitting an application on a free basis, neither a short time frame for its consideration, nor even the consideration itself as such is guaranteed. If the site is already old enough, authoritative and developed, there is a chance that the editor Yasha will independently add it to the Catalog on his own, without an application, but this probability is not high.
The second option is to make a one-time payment (about 15,000 rubles) for getting into the Catalog to speed up the consideration of the application. However, even payment will not help add a site to Yasha that contradicts his requirements.
