Figuring out how to do SEO content Silos for my niche

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Michael Martinez: "every source seems to say that its bad to interlink Silos, "
  
  Take those as opinions, not universal facts. Consider what would be most useful for your visitors.
  
  "Are there any exceptions to the rule of never interlink Silos?"
  
  Absolutely. Siloing is just one of many Web design strategies. It doesn`t guarantee anything.
  
  If you`re not comfortable organizing a large site, then using a silo strategy helps you organize things. From there, you tweak.
  
  You`re never obligated to stick to someone else`s generic blueprint.
  
  
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  Mark Vinner: Thanks for your in-depth answer. I`m fairly new to making websites, so I wasn`t sure. It can be tricky to know what is opinion vs fact when Google doesn`t release how their algorithm works. i.e. none of the information is absolute, some of it is guesswork.
  
  I started out wanting to set up Silos before I even knew about them. I experienced the issue of trying to make pages with categories when they`re for posts. Silo`s get around that problem.
  
  My site won`t be large, but it deals with 4 different topics and each 1 could be its own Silo. However, they all interrelate. After I posted my question I realized a potential solution. I could also make each topic its own site and then interlink them.
  
  Does anyone know how backlinks affect SEO if they are with another site owned by the same person?
  
  
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  Richard Hearne: You shouldn`t consider silos in such a pure way. They can be very useful for various purposes, but there is no rule that says linking between silos is bad. Think of as a continuum - at the bad end is every page linking to every other page, while at the good end you would have an architecture far closer to the image you shared. There are probably very few cases where that structure would be most appropriate, and a very pure silo structure may actually itself lead to sub-optimal SEO outcomes.
  
  
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  Mark Vinner: Richard, thanks for your response. I will link the pages that are relevant to the others.