The title of this topic is not a typo, while going through the main quest again I thought about what would happen if you got all or some of the goblin tribe totem staffs and placed them inside an oblivion gate then closed it?
Because the goblins will go to any lengths to get their totem staff back... would they just hang around where the Oblivion gate was? Would the staff respawn at their cave? Or would it simply be forever lost to Oblivion?

There are a couple of things that bear on your question. I don't know the exact answer because I've never tried it, so this is my best educated guess.

Goblins will transition areas in order to recover a totem, so I think they would go through an Oblivion gate in order to retrieve it. If you closed the gate and left the staff on the other side, though, it should disappear from the game since the areas reset after closing. The exception might be the layout that has two gates (it must be closed twice), but you might have to find both gates in Cyrodiil. Give it a shot and see what happens. The worst that you'll see is that the goblins will (1) mill around the gate, (2) enter and get stomped or (3) never show up in the first place.

AFAIK that feature wasn't implemented in the vanilla game, unless you're talking mods(I think the UOP adds it?).

@ Going Viral: What feature are you talking about? Goblins will go after their totems in the Vanilla game, as I've done it before and I play on X-box 360. If that's what you were talking about.

I'm going to give it a try here in a few and I'll post the results. :ph34r:

They actually don't, outside of that one quest that relates to it.

They actually do. Because I've done it. I placed a totem inside the walls of battlehorn castle and it was pretty awesome.
And for further proof I will quote from the official strategy guide to Oblivion from prima in the section titled "fun with goblins"

"The bloody hand and rock biter goblins from the miscellaneous quest 'goblin trouble' are just two of the seven goblin tribes. Each tribe has it's own home cave and totem staff, and you can amuse yourself by stealing any or all of their totems, shuffling them around and making the goblins go nuts on each other to recover them."

"One fun idea: Put six of the heads in one location and then sit back and watch the chaos. There's no limit to the distance goblins will travel to recover a totem, but they have no special gift for selecting a safe route. Hence, if they run into bruisers en route- for example, Imperial legion troopers- they may get slaughtered. And since goblins hate other goblins, if they run into another tribe, they're likely to fight then and there."

Edit: that is from page 300-301 of the revised edition that covers all of the DLC except SI.

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And the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Goblins says:

That's just as much proof, so quotes don't do much good in this situation.

The "totem war" feature actually was implemented, just not very well (the UOP corrected some things, but I'm not sure how thoroughly), and a lot of people have had trouble getting it work as intended. All you can do is try out your idea and see what happens, since you've had success with getting goblins to follow their totem. All I know for sure is that it's the War Chief, and possibly the Shaman, that will follow the totem, while the other goblins follow their War Chief.

I just quoted the strategy guide because the previous posters said it wasn't in the game as it clearly is. Even if it can be a bit wonky.

Anyway.. Here are my results.
I stole the bloody hand goblins totem -the one that the rock biter goblins steal in the quest goblin trouble- I placed it inside an Oblivion gate that spawned near their cave then I left and messed around for a bit. When I returned to the gate the Totem staff was no longer inside. [this being the third time I had checked on it] So, I went to cracked wood cave, where the bloody hand goblins hang out.
But the totem wasn't there. Then I thought maybe the rock biter goblins stole it -again- from the oblivion gate. But all I found in their cave was their totem staff. So I don't know what happened to it!
Maybe the gate reset and it's forever lost in Oblivion?