sorry, don't want to turn this into moz, but I could do with a sanity check on Hummingbird...

What is your take on what it means in terms of what would now be required to get more search traffic?. Because I have made my decisions based on what happened to traffic in late august/early sept, where I saw specific patterns on clients sites in the month before hummingbird was announced, couldn't work out why and then saw the HB announcement at which point (I thought it) all clicked into place.

But, er, my thoughts are actually really different from what a load of other people are suggesting.  I'd like to hear what some people I respect (and some of the rest of you  ) reckon because I'm 95% sure I should stick to my guns but if I'm wrong, then I will have a long term issue... and keywords dissapearing makes it hard to sense check from analytics in the short term!

The word from one of the rest  :
In my spammy world, I have noticed that:

• at least in the verticals I watch, the focus is less on the anchor texts and more on the onsite - can't guarantee it's true of every vertical as the difference sometimes is quite impressive
• apparently they had to turn off some anti spam filters when rolling out hummingbird as they were incompatible with the new engine so for a while, ranking sites with spammy shitty links has become much easier. The time it takes to get a site indexed and ranking has improved as well it seems - quite like when they rolled out caffeine. I am sure they are now coding he new filters like crazy but hey, it's good while it lasts
• all that said, there are certain top competitive keywords (not even whole verticals) that have shortlists of sites allowed to rank there, selected manually, sometimes by lazy interns who can make mistakes like short listing the home page of the UK parliament site instead of a more relevant internal page, for queries like "payday loans", and there is no chance in hell ranking for that keyword unless you are on that shortlist - but that's the payday loans update, not hummingbird, just to confirm this is still at play after hummingbird