Important questions which will help many if answered!

I'm just wondering; if one has a fairly new site (or even an old one with little traffic) and one joins an affiliate program and gets approved, wont they notice the site being new with little traffic but tons of clicks?

The other thing thats bothering me is when cloaking affiliate urls, the impressions don't seem to add up which may also seem suspicious.

e.g 100 impression \ 233 clicks \ 230% ctr

Or do they generally not care?

If they do care, without having to buy bogus traffic, how can one get past this?

- WildJokers

One can have a website with zero traffic and use ppc to have legitimate clicks on his affiliate link
One can also use his mailing list, social networking/bookmarking, posting on forum etc...
No matter the traffic on your website, there are many legitimate ways to get clicks even if you don't little or no traffic. So why would they care?

So to answer your first question : they can't tell whether your clicks are legitimate or not, so don't worry if your website have little traffic.

Then 230%CTR looks actually suspicious... They might think that you have cloaked your aff url, but I'm not sure cloaking an aff link is forbidden.
You shouldn't cloak a link if you want it to be indexed by google, because link cloaking in BH seo means showing something different to google bots and real users, so obviously big G doesn't like it.
But I don't think this is a problem for affiliate programs, you just replace your awful aff url by another one which looks better.
So if cloaking is not a problem for your aff network, then you won't have any problem because they may know you use cloaked links, but they don't know how white or black hat is the way you use them
Btw I see cloaked links very often in the "internet marketing"/clickbank business. The so called "gurus" often give you a cloaked link that looks like hxxt://www.gurusname.com/recommends/thisproduct, and this page redirects to their clickbank affiliate link, it's absolutely ok to do this.

The only real problem you'll have, is that your stats are all screwed up so you can't use them, but anyway, as long as the cash comes in...

Well with most affiliate networks, your site goes through screening before being accepted, so I would imagine this is because they assume your main your traffic source (and usually recommended by them) is from your site.

This is why I asked the above questions. The cloaking part is especially important because when one cloaks the affiliate link (via php or masking) the impressions don't count up until you actually make the click (which then gives you a 100% CTR)

I reckon this is why so many people are being banned so easily. With a cloaked link, one can drive bogus traffic to it but then they would still need to click the link which would still leave that problem in place.

What I tried as a work-around is:

1. create a cloaked link and place it in a separate .html file on my site (hidden from users but directed to my torrents)
2. created the same link, not cloaked and made it visible on my site.

This generates valid impressions but unless you have a REALLY busy site, it still doesn't justify the click through's.

just my thoughts, please feel free to add to this.