Exact-match anchor text: Anchor text that repeats the target page's main search phrase word for word, such as “sourdough starter” linking to a guide that ranks for “sourdough starter”.
Is it a problem?
On links from other sites, a pile of identical keyword anchors has long been a classic sign of bought or manufactured links, which Google’s spam policies on link spam target. On your own internal links the risk is much lower, and the evidence points the other way: in Zyppy’s study of 23 million internal links across 1,800 sites, pages with at least one exact-match internal anchor had about five times the search traffic of pages with none. That is a correlation — popular pages attract more links of every kind — but it is no argument for avoiding the exact phrase.
The problem is repetition. If forty posts on a home-brewing blog all link to the fermentation guide with the words “beer fermentation temperature”, the thirty-ninth adds nothing, and readers notice the sameness.
How to check it on WordPress
Export every internal link with its anchor from a crawler, then count anchors per target page. A healthy target shows a spread: the exact phrase a few times, partial matches (“keeping your fermenter cool”), and descriptive phrases that only make sense in their own sentence. A target where one phrase makes up most of its inbound internal links is usually the work of an auto-linking plugin or a habit of pasting the post title.
What to do
- Keep exact matches where the sentence naturally uses the phrase.
- When you add new links, use the words already in the linking sentence instead of forcing the keyword in.
- Make sure the exact phrase points at one page only. Two targets for “best travel insurance for backpackers” means your site has not decided which page answers it.
The exact-match anchor text guide goes through when to use the exact phrase and how to fix an archive that overused it.