The fix, in one snippet
<a href="/guides/arch-support">how arch support works</a>
<a href="/guides/arch-support">choosing insoles for flat feet</a>Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
For each internal target we collect the visible text of every link pointing at it and count the distinct variants. A target is reported when it is linked five times or more and every one of those links uses identical anchor text.
This is reported as information, never as a failure. A navigation item that appears on every page is supposed to say the same thing, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Why it matters
Anchor text is a description of a page written by someone other than its author, which is why it carries weight. Variety in that description covers more of the ways people actually ask for the thing: "arch support", "insoles for flat feet" and "how arch support works" are three queries, and one repeated anchor reaches one of them.
Uniform anchors are also a signature of generated linking rather than editorial linking, and heavy exact-match repetition across a site is one of the patterns link-spam systems look for. On internal links the risk is low, but the missed opportunity is real.
How to fix it
Where the link sits inside prose, write the anchor to fit the sentence and describe the target:
<a href="/guides/arch-support">how arch support actually works</a>
<a href="/guides/arch-support">choosing insoles for flat feet</a>Leave navigation, breadcrumbs and buttons alone: consistency is the point there, and changing the wording of a menu item per page would be worse than the problem. What benefits from variety is the editorial link inside an article, where the surrounding sentence gives you something true to say about the destination.
Where this fits
Internal anchor text repetition is check 6 of 7 that the seo & site health audit runs under links and site structure, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Generic or empty anchor text (low), where "Click here" describes the action, not the destination. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
Internal anchor text repetition closes one route in. The next one down is Pages buried deep in the structure, where pages several clicks from the entry point are crawled less often and carry less internal authority.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error, and Duplicate body content, where two pages with identical body text are one page at two addresses, and search engines will pick one of them for you. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Internal anchor text repetition (info severity)
Scanner check id: seo-anchor-profileThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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