I am of the mind that Mods can also prevent submissions from an account from ever being displayed in the page rankings.
Many months ago, I had several submissions that were visible when I was logged in, and yet when I accessed HN as a guest, they were not in the submission ranking.
That's something that happens. It's always worth talking to the mods to sort that out. There's a bunch of stuff to detect vote rings, spam, etc etc and sometimes it unfairly blocks the wrong stuff.
From what I've seen mods are happy to fix any problems.
Many months ago, I had several submissions that were visible when I was logged in, and yet when I accessed HN as a guest, they were not in the submission ranking.