Search submissions have never really had an impact on ranking. The submissions were part of the "discovery" process, and for the major engines never had any interaction with the ranking side of the engine. It was simply a way to add a site that the engine did not know about to the list of places to crawl. Once a search engine knew that the site existed, a new submission might trigger a recrawl ahead of schedule, but should not have affected rankings.

Today, however, the spiders are more efficient. Suggesting a site that is already indexed is at best pointless because the engine will see it as duplicate and ignore the submission, or at worst harmful if the spider decides the site has been manually submitted too many times and flags it as possible spam.

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The best way to learn anything, is to question everything.