Internal linking for small site

[Zoolander]

I have a site with 13 pages, 6 are product pages, 5 are free tips pages (the other 2 are the home page and contact form). Currently I have the navbar at top of site with a "products" dropdown menu for the 6 product pages and a "Tips" dropdown menu for the 5 tip pages.  All categories except the contact page are at the bottom as breadcrumbs, the homepage is "home" and the rest are relevant user friendly keyword anchor text.

So I have 2 more pages to ad to "Tips" and am wondering whether to have a new 2nd level tips page that links to a 3rd level of 7 different tips pages, or keep it shallow as it is, with only 2 levels from the homepage to the other (now 13) pages, with a potential of 22 pages in the foreseable few years? (and some graphics work to make it user friendly like how Zappo's has categories to the side on each of its drop down navbar menu's and non-link text categories for its bottom of page breadcrumb links)

Can those aforementioned pages linking to each other in the footer dilute link equity? (I think that's one of the primary reasons I'm curious).

What do you think of this: http://www.dbswebsite.com/blog/2012/08/08/internal-linking-101-5-best-practices/ (I guess I should no follow my contact page), could it be better to have a 2nd level page for "Tips" to get more equity to that page rather than across all 7 tips pages?

I have read around about this on here (hence how I found out about Zappo's) and elsewhere and wanted ask to make sure.

[whiteboardanimator]

Well I would say that this should firstly be dictated by the user experience, as opposed to building your menus with search engines in mind. Although this seems counter-intutitive, building sites for google is bad SEO.

I would suggest you build the menu to be the most simple and usable for your users. Keep in mind the future updates you mention, as if you change your menu structure again, I am sure this wont confuse users - but it is change, and too much change is not good for trust.

Therefore, decide what will be the best option for your user, both now and in the future. Then let this dictate your decision.

Hope this helps

[Zoolander]

Thanks for your reply. I agree about user experience but for both options it can be made user friendly so I might as well choose one that is best for SEO as well.

The main difference on having 3 levels being that the footer and Navbar would only have a "Tips" link, which might be neat, but then if not then all tips would be individually linked on the footer under a non-linked text title of "Tips" and on navbar (similar to Zappo's Navbar but much smaller, going sideways on dropdown menus doesn't look that uncommon) which would give the same info that you would get by clicking onto a 2nd level Tips page, might that also be preferable to user on a small site like mine (say 10 different tips pages eventually).  I added some more stuff to my original post about spreading internal link equity, which I didn't think to mention originally.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Why not make a Nother navigation bar called Q&A or frequently asked questions something similar to that tips. And set of adding to the length which could be hard to click on some mobile devices.

I honestly do not think that you're going to get much more out of your website by no following good links on your site for instance if those webpages are going to get any information at all pointing to them or anything links pointing to them it'll all be wasted. So I don't really believe the fishbowl effect is necessary for this type of thing. A great resource I found for very technical questions is this one right here.

http://www.distilled.net/u/

To make a long answer short I would not no follow or no index I would simply add on another category called tips or questions FAQ whatever you like.

I also agree with SEO consultant that is never a good idea to build sites with search engines in mind you should always do it with the customer or user.

I hope this is of help sincerely,

Thomas