In Google webmaster tool, i've noticed a new feature : they tell you how many pages of your site have duplicate META description. I did have the same one for the whole site, i guess it would improve ones rankings if there is a separate one for each page and it works for the keywords as well. I do believe it became a more important factor for google and it makes sense as the spiders could easily understand the page's relevancy without having to pick it from the content.
I don't think it would hurt. Not going to help either. A lot of sites use the same meta description for their pages.
Why would they tell you about duplicate META description in webmaster tools? Are you saying its a useless info, thats all?
I wonder too. With duplicate meta, one page, mainly the index page, will have importance, but I believe the other pages with same meta will have an hard time ranking well, since Google will give them little to none weigth.
Duplicated META tags do not harm your ranking, but you are not getting as good positioning as you could be. You should try to give each page a unique META package - description and keywords (of course, the title should be different from page to page, as well). The more related the META tags are to the actual page content, the better the page will rank.
That sounds more reasonable. But hey, lets put it this way: If your site is "not getting as good positioning as you could be" because of duplicate META description, it means it pretty much harms your rankings
Well, I could go into the grammatical issues with that statement (I'm a grammar freak ), but i won't. But, it really doesn't harm your rankings - it just doesn't help them.