financial zen

I’ve been receiving a number of track-backs from other sites that scrape my site for content.

Essentially, they’re pulling in the first x amount of words and posting it as “blah blah had a great post: _insert_my_content_ read more here _link to my site_”

Now, should I be mad at this? There are two ways to look at this.

1. They are stealing my content - but sometimes they ARE linking back to me - and without any filtering rel tags.
2. They’re making money off of me - they have ads plastered all over their site, which essentially means they’re aiming at the suckers who click through on their ads instead of checking out the article (potentially getting *my* advertising money).

To be totally honest, I’m not sure whether I should lay the proverbial smack down on them - filing DMCA takedown notices (technically, some of them are citing me, and linking to me). What I see on a MAJORITY of blogs nowadays are just that - citations and links. Full of the occasional opinion posts - but even more full of “here’s my links of what other people wrote about Personal Finance” and in turn, those links tend to have people linking back and forth - and usually to the same article.
I guess the trade off from a scraper is I’ve got that many more links pointing at me - as long as I’m not the one setting up the spam sites to begin with. Anyone have any experience with scrapers? What have you done (or not done)?

So I got a few answers in my educational quest on estate taxes. I talked to an accountant that said if the deceased had paid taxes all ready, than I have nothing to worry about unless it’s property that needs to be sold.

Of course, I used my google-fu to supplement this answer and the always informative bankrate.com has the answer:

*Ohio has no inheritance tax.

*Because federal tax law totally repealed the federal credit allowed for state death taxes for dates of death occurring on or after Jan. 1, 2005, the Ohio Additional Tax on estates is constructively repealed. This change is prospective and applies to decedents’ dates of death occurring on or after July 1, 2005.

So now, once the cash is “in hand” I need to constructively figure out how I’m going to leverage it towards investing it - and doubling it!