Over at the Google Groups, a thread has surfaced that touches the topic of Duplicate Meta Tags. In response to a Webmaster's query, Google has responded by saying that although Google does not penalize Webmasters, still it does discourage them from using Duplicate Meta Tags.
Here are the excerpts from the thread at Google Groups:
“So I know there has been some chit-chat about the duplicate Meta-Data
on Dynamic sites, although I have a slight adjustment.
On my site I have my description I have a few standard words such as,
"Review, Ratings, Comments, etc…" But what I have done to try and
make each page unique because of the database pulling the thousands of
pages… I made it
"Dyn.City & Dyn.Name Review, Dyn.City & Dyn.Name Ratings, Dyn.City &
Dyn.Name Comments….. etc"
But Google Webmaster Tools is still telling me that it's duplicate
Meta Data… Would it be wise to try and Randomize them? Without
sending a time frame on the randomizer I wouldn't think this would be
a good idea… I do the same concept for the
Any possible suggestions, sorry if it's not that clear.â€
“Hi StickyPages
It's hard to make recommendations without knowing the URLs in
question, but generally speaking the duplicate meta data information
in Webmaster Tools is provided as a tip to help you to make your site
more compelling in search results to your users. You don't have to
clear all duplicate warnings out to win 
— make your site so that
it makes sense to your users, and if that means that some URLs will
have duplicate meta data because that's the way it makes sense to you,
then so be it. Don't worry too much about that.
Cheers
John.â€
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
It is best to exercise a habit to keep meta tags unique within your website. Google Webmaster Tool as mentioned above, does show warnings for sites that are having duplication in their meta tags. Remove these duplication and your website is at a better position.
Hmm… I do the same thing on my large eCommerce sites – when i have like 1000 products what i’ll do is create about five meta description templates and split it up at 200 products for each description. Then I dynamically plug in the product name into the description to make each one unique, or least i thought that made it unique… sounds like i might need to change some things
Its a good practice to ensure your Meta Data is unique for each page. Also I believe duplicate Meta data pages are vulnerable to be termed as supplemental.
Also, unique meta tags does help us target so many varied set of keywords.
Hi,
I have duplicate meta data on my product pages, I use actinic and my websmaster says he does not know how to change it would this have a really detrimental effect.
r I wouldn't think this would be
a good idea