"Always use exact-match anchor text for internal links."

"Always use exact-match anchor text for internal links."

Easy there.

For internal links, descriptive anchors do help Google understand the target — that part's real. But "always exact-match" turns a good instinct into a footprint of identical blue phrases that reads like a doorway page.

Here's what actually happens: internal anchors set context for the destination, and you control all of them, so over-optimizing is trivially easy and trivially obvious. A page linked 40 times with the identical anchor "best forex broker" looks engineered because it is. Natural internal linking varies: the keyword, a partial, the brand, a contextual phrase mid-sentence.

And the bigger lever isn't the anchor at all — it's which page you link from and how prominent the link is. An exact-match anchor buried in a footer beats nothing and loses to a contextual link in the body.

Vary the words. Obsess over placement instead.