I realize that SEO should be a very mixed effort --- I am not planning on doing this, but I wondering - what would happen if I wrote like 50 articles for a TINY tiny niche and then submitted them to many article directories. What exactly would happen? If all the article were unique, would they dominate the engines for hte search terms -- long and short tail?
That "Tiny tiny" niche will be completely dominated by your articles. I've seen that before so that won't be the first time someone decided to implement such a strategy. Do you think your traffic will increase if you totally dominate the first two pages on Google?
If your are submitting the same article to many directories Google may not give much weight to each link. They may even disregard most of the links as duplicate content not worth indexing. If you do this, you should also try to submit the articles gradually. If you do this too fast, the search engines may consider it spam and disregard the links. Overall it should be a successful strategy. If the niche is too small, there may not be many websites willing to republish the articles.
If those 50 articles are actually written and not copied or put through a content spinner you will see the results. If the niche truly is tiny and you spam out your article submissions over a period of a week you will see the results. If your articles contain nothing but affiliate links then it will not matter how fast you submit them. I would say do it before that niche is no longer tiny and grows in size from other competitors.
If you write 50 unique articles with a nice keyword density and submit a couple of them a day. Yes you will dominate that tiny niche, because content is king.
Nothing bad will happen. 50 Articles is not a big thing, and article direcories take time to approve articles + google will take time to index the articles too. Make sure the anchors are not same for every link though, it don't look very natural.
if you spam the directories and get links to fast google will kick you from their index for spamming as vansterdam said in his reply... You need to submit them naturally over time to gain a good solid rank for you keywords.
Thanks guys. In response to you guys saying to not do it too quickly: I couldn't people do this to their competitors? Submit 400 articles all with same anchor text in a short amount of time?
You would get better ranks from submitting 50 articles over a set period and using a mixture of your main and lsi (related) keyword phases per article and always submit them into the categories of your web site theme.
Develop a site with 25 articles and you'll dominate the niche. Then, use another 25 articles to submissions.