The Importance of Different Meta Tags

[dailypress]

I installed a Meta Tag module on my website running Drupal as the CMS. It added the following Meta Tags:

meta name="abstract"
meta name="description"
meta name="keywords"
meta name="robots"
link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

1. I was wondering how important you think each tag is?

and also

2. do you think if Im not going to take the time to go back and add unique meta tags to all pages individually am I better off removing the Keyword Metatag option from the whole site or should I just leave the two most important keywords in there?

Is there really a penalty for having similar meta tags from Google?

Thanks in advance,
D.P.

[g1smd]

You need the meta description and each page should have a different one, the tag content matching the main content on that page.

You don't need the others.

[tedster]

Is there really a penalty for having similar meta tags

No, there is no penalty. But the ranking problems that poor meta descriptions can generate may hurt the site's traffic just as much as a true penlaty would.

[dailypress]

The Meta description module basically takes the first few lines which is ok for my site however it ads the br and &nbsp as well.