Linking with the same anchor 200 times isn't "consistency." It's a footprint.

Linking with the same anchor 200 times isn't "consistency." It's a footprint.

Unpopular opinion: forcing the exact-match anchor "best running shoes" into every internal link to that page doesn't sculpt relevance — it flattens it. Google reads internal anchors as a vocabulary, not a vote count. When 200 links all say the literal same string, you've told the algorithm one thing about a page that could rank for forty queries.

The fix: vary anchors across the semantic field. "Trail shoes," "shoes for marathon training," "lightweight runners" — same target, wider net. The page inherits a topic, not a keyword.

Still hardcoding one anchor sitewide because a 2014 blog post told you to? Tell me why.