I have been getting house sitting requests thar are outside my maxium distance? Why does this happen, I feel awful when i have to turn a client down because of this situation?

I looked at your profile briefly. Congrats for being in the top ten listings, which means more clients see and likely contact you rather than others. I see that under House Sitting the maximum number of miles is not listed. Although, you can probably see it see under preferences, it doesn't look like clients see that. I'd suggest you add it to your profile, where you say you're glad to provide sitting in their home (within 5 miles). Even then, some people do not completely read profiles or may hope you'll make an exception and contact you, but hopefully that will cut down requests that aren't matches.

If the owner is searching by city, or even zip code, the results won't exclude you if your service area includes any part of their specified location. So if someone searches for Denver, you'll show up because you provide services in Denver, even if your range doesn't cover the entire city. If someone has their profile completed with their address and requests a travel sitter, you should not appear in the results if that specific address is outside your range. Essentially, they'd rather have false positives than false negatives, where they may exclude you from the search results when you should have been listed. And while it's frustrating to get requests that aren't within your parameters, it would be worse if you never got requests that were in your parameters at all because the algorithms were more conservative in how they show results.

Once someone has gotten to your profile, there's nothing preventing them from sending a message, even if a component of their request (like the service area, dates, or size/age of dog) is in conflict with your preferences.