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Hi James,
No link building was done for these two domains. If they have links they would be random and automated from various places such as whois services scrapers etc.
Not sure I understand this part:
"a funny thing is if you view the cache version of the website Google notes that the hyphen domain as splitting up the text with spaces."
Are you talking about these two:
In May I announced test results for domain hyphenation but after a 3 month followup the results have changed and the hyphenated domain now wins on what seems to be the first link instance advantage. I was unable to discover any other factors which may have influenced this test but if anyone has any ideas I would like to hear about it.
Here are the details of the SEO test and revealed URLs.
I think I'll do that test! 
http://dejanseo.com.au/comprehensive-guide-to-reliable-search-results/
(scroll to the bottom).
Some of my elaborate articles have very long URLs:
They rank well yet if you look for them in the site list you get this:
http://www.google.com.au/#q=site%3Adejanseo.com.au
speed, about, faq, inference
note that these are both pages and posts - so linked from different levels.
What do you make of it?
Last time I tested to see what impacts it was a balance between page strength, crawling date and URL length. This last one is interesting and you will notice that short pages tends to be towards the start of the list and very long URLs closer to the end.
We're building one on client's request
Back in the day I would say it's two datacentres being queried. Then again I've seen algorithm testing do the same thing. Latest observation was the PageRank stuffup by Google and it was interesting to see results jump up and down as they were recalculating it. Not a factor guys huh! Think twice 
Interesting question. In theory PageRank splits up evenly across all links and in the case of two links it merges back into the same page (minus the dampening factor). It would make an interesting experiment if you were to take two pages and from each link to one of the two pages via 1 and 10 links respectively. End result? See if one ranks better due to dampening factor in the original PageRank formula.
Relevant mathematical analysis:
http://www.bcamath.org/documentos_public/archivos/actividades/TalkBCAM20090908KA.pdf
In a natural situation brands typically get exact anchor text only if it's their brand "acme plastering" and not for what they want to rank for "plastering london". If Google starts seeing 100% exact match on all your anchor text you're going to raise a few flags with them. Including what you do is a good idea next to the brand like it was suggested above.
OK, I was going to discuss some techniques which can be employed with Flash but this site hardly has any content and it's all very visual. User experience / navigation could be improved as well.
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Awww.ziba.com.au shows a few URLs in index. What confuses me is why go from index to main - what does that achieve?
Options you have are:
Focus on TITLE & Meta description in combination with inbound links.
If you can add some descriptive text under flash which would explain to search engines (and users who do not support flash) what the site is about including basic contact information.
The effect will be minimal and other factors will outrank these subtle variations by far. I recommend that you do what makes sense for yourself and your users. Go easy on bolding terms on the page, excessive amounts are not a good thing.
Pretty much if you follow advice from this page you can't go wrong. As far as I know there isn't a "content comprehensiveness tool" out there (yet).
Yes, I forgot about that post. These rules became guidelines for my team as soon as they were launched. They fail to provide specific technical guidance however. For example "Would you trust this information?" - how does Google figure that out? Surely there are algorithmic signals involved.
I like this. It makes so much sense and Google does have the data to put the criteria together.
Topical relevance can be stretched with a bit of creativity and create a perfectly legitimate reason for it. I would say you provide guidelines and examples to authors on how to properly structure links to avoid potential spam filters and flags with Google. I literally just posted a discussion item on this topic here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/elements-of-a-quality-article
In your opinion, what are the signals Google uses to judge the quality of an article or post?
Here are some of my ideas:
Looking forward to your contributions.
Dejan SEO website was done about a year ago.
It took us weeks to detect the problem and it was finally discovered once Google Webmaster Tools updated. It suggested that most of our content contained words "serial number, adobe, crack...etc". Upon inspection we found that we were hacked and a cloaking script was installed showing pirated software to Google and clean site to users. The links were visible in the source of the cached page.
We cleaned up the site and did 301 from dejan.com.au to dejanseo.com.au
(this was not needed, but I wanted to do it for branding anyway)
Back in the results within a week.
There are countless little resource/ppc/affiliate websites out there trying to earn a few bucks. Most of them are pretty thin, but every now and then you will run into a good one. I would start by targeting each country and finding those quality forex sites to cross-promote with.
If you provide data/information a widget/graph/tool might be an ideal way to earn links.