Hey guys

When I am writing a new article on my blog, I typically create internal links to about 5-8 of my other articles (if they are on the same topic). These links are very natural and flow well with my article.

However, I am in the habit of choosing the exact match keywords when internal linking to older articles. So if my blog was about sport and I had 10 articles about soccer, they would have a number of internal links between each other (which is good I presume) but each link is anchored to the exact keyword that I am targeting on the destination page.

Is this still considered anchor text over optimization? Should I just choose random text (sometimes including the keyword) when linking to other internal pages? If I do this, I will still be mentioning the exact match keyword in my article (some of them are bound to come up since each article is soccer for example) but I will purposely choose not to anchor it, opting rather for more generic, none exact keyword anchors.

Any advise is appreciated.

Thanks!