Can anybody explain why Google has denied the removal request of
http://www.visiblyonline.com/categories/1/    .../17/ and
http://www.visiblyonline.com/mainpage/1/   .../17/ and all sub
directories below these.

All these pages return a 404 mesage.

Thanks.

Hi,
Check your server access logs because
I am not sure that your URLs respond with
HTTP status 404 (Not found) to
Googlebot visits, see
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:qwoFfwBFRfkJ:www.visiblyonline.com...

And change visiblyonline to visibly-not-online (joke, sorry).

Cristina.

On Sep 25, 11:59 am, JackJ wrote:

Hi Jack--

Welcome to the group!
Your request was probably denied because those directories aren't
blocked by your robots.txt file. Check out this help topic for
details:
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=59819

In particular:
"To remove a directory and its contents, you must ensure that the
pages you want to remove have been blocked using a robots.txt file.
Returning a 404 isn't enough, because it's possible for a directory to
return a 404 status code, but still serve out files underneath it.
Using robots.txt to block a directory ensures that all of its children
are disallowed as well."

Hi Jack,
Sorry, what I meant is that it is a good idea to check
in your server access logs if indeed your server
returns to Googlebot HTTP status 404 (Not found) for non-existing
URLs.
The cached copy http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:qwoFfwBFRfkJ:www.visiblyonline.com...
indicates that Googlebot got HTTP status response 300 (Multiple
choices).

If the URL would have responded with HTTP status 404 (Not found)
then it would not have been cached.

Cristina.