"Use exact-match anchor text for internal links."

"Use exact-match anchor text for internal links."

For every link? That's how you build a footprint that screams "optimized."

Internal anchors have more room than external ones, but "exact-match always" is still wrong. The actual distribution checklist:

— Vary the anchors pointing at one page. Exact phrase, partial, descriptive, natural sentence fragments. A spread looks like writing; identical anchors look like a script.
— Make the anchor describe the destination, so a reader knows where they're going before they click. That's the whole job of an anchor.
— Avoid "click here" and "this page" — they pass zero topical context, which is the one thing internal anchors are actually good for.
— Don't link the same phrase to the same page seven times on one article. Once, high in the content, is plenty.
— Audit with a crawler: list all anchors per target URL. If they're all identical, fix it.

Natural variation beats robotic precision. (Internal linking forgives more than external, but "forgives more" is not "do the obviously gameable thing on every link.")