A lot of SEO companies, including yours truly, have been preaching about the dangers of exact match anchor text. In case you have forgotten, exact match anchor text is when you point a multitude of links at a page you’re trying to rank, and all the anchor text in those links is exactly the same. One of the major updates with Panda was neutering exact match anchor text, because it is obviously not organic (and thus, spam.) Does that same penalty exist for your internal linking though? How might exact match anchor text on your internal links affect your SEO for small business?
Matt Cutts has the answer.
In another amazingly bland Google Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts tackles this very question:
Do internal website links with exact match keyword anchor text hurt a website? These links help our users navigate our website properly. Are too many internal links with the same anchor text likely to result in a ranking downgrade because of Penguin?
Matts answer is that the exact match anchor text penalty DOESN’T apply to internal links. Google understands the need for internal navigation and breadcrumbs and they allow for the average amount of them.
He DOES add that you still shouldn’t take it too far. If there are great big lists of exact match links spammed all over the site, you’re going to have a bad time.