“Correlation does not imply causation.”

That statement might as well be the scrolling fine print at the end of a 15 second car commercial. No matter how carefully prefaced a blog post or piece of research on SEO is, it seems as though most people just don’t understand – or don’t want to understand – what this means.

A good example of this is how a recent piece of research from SEOMoz continues to be misconstrued by many bloggers and SEOs. In case you aren’t familiar, SEOMoz published data showing strong correlation between Facebook shares and rankings on Google. Unsurprisingly, what many people often seem to take away from the research is that Facebook shares have a strong and direct impact on rankings.

There’s an important difference between those two statements. SEOMoz’s research is interesting, likely sound, and definitely useful – and they guarded carefully against misinterpretation in the original post describing their findings. But if the action item you took away was to beg, plead, or pay for Facebook shares, you are seriously missing the point. And you aren’t alone.

What the research really says

It’s entirely possible that Facebook shares correlate with rankings, even if Google isn’t using Facebook shares to calculate rankings (maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.) The important thing to understand is that there are other factors at play that could be impacting both rankings and Facebook shares in a similar way, even if there is no direct connection. Maybe it has something to do with whether or not people actually like your content and naturally send many other signals indicating this to the engines? Unfortunately, there is no way for us to prove either way.

Even if Facebook shares do directly impact rankings, chances are that a half-hearted attempt at forcing them as opposed to growing them organically wouldn’t have much of an impact anyway. (Sorry, but that Mechanical Turk squadron you hired to amass 3,000 Facebook shares isn’t hard for the engines to spot.)

The real takeaway from the research isn’t that Facebook shares influence rankings (they may or may not be.) For me, it’s that search results may finally be evolving to the point where the best indicator of rankings is just how much people actually want to consume your content. That’s valuable, actionable insight that should be guiding your SEO efforts every day.

Hearing what you want to hear

So why the disconnect? Sure, headlines get shortened and twisted. That’s part of the problem. But there’s something bigger at work here – a persistent problem that plays out in the SEO community over and over again.

In some ways, it’s a case of self-serving interpretation. Many choose to misinterpret SEOMoz’s findings because it’s just easier. It’s easier to define your client’s “SEO problem” with a number of links, likes, or Facebook shares. It’s easier to get budget for a quantifiable fix rather than something as intangible as creating high quality content. It’s also easier to keep doing what you’ve always done rather than shift your perspective and your tactics.

I wonder if this attitude isn’t an unfortunate side effect of the history of the industry. SEO was once a kind of shortcut to getting traffic and attention that was heavy on the technical details and light on the marketing. At the time, that was all well and good.

Of course, things have changed. Search engines are far more sophisticated, webmaster friendly, and much more closely attuned to what their users actually like. Technical soundness is still important, but technical tricks and manipulating non-human metrics just doesn’t work in the same way that it used to. And with the incorporation of more social and user metrics, we are seeing another big shift toward the importance of marketing skills, and away from technical hacks.

No doubt that it’s a tough jump to make from working with machines to working with people, but that’s the evolution that SEO faces as a discipline. Effective SEO now requires marketing abilities in addition to technical skills and the ability to amass links, shares or likes. You can either avoid that fact and keep it up with the wheel spinning, or step up to the plate and start marketing.