Duplicate meta tags for keywords and description

Hi,
I am embarrassed to admit that I did not do my homework when it came to optimizing the meta keywords and description tags. I am using Coldfusion includes to make site changes on the fly. Right now I have a website with about 3,500 pages plus a forums. Most of the site (the vast majority) of it has the same two meta tags for keywords and descriptions.

What I am trying to figure out is whether to go back over the next month or so and update the duplicate tags to more current and relevant data starting with my most critical content areas....or.....should I (because I'm hearing that meta tags are not important as much anymore) just simply use my Dreamweaver and do a "search and replace" to very quickly remove the duplicate meta tags and re-upload the files to my site in say 10 minutes?

One of my main competitors is a very large site that ranks in the top spots for my major keywords and they do not even use the meta description and keyword tags on their pages. I do not want to incur a possible penalty in the search engines because of this this meta tag oversight.

What do you think I should do and why?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Make sure you are not including showpost pages to your sitemaps.

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

Make sure you are not including showpost pages to your sitemaps.

I am really new to this vbSEO, where would I turn that off so as to not show showpost pages in my sitemaps? I've noticed that the sitemaps that have been generated have more threads, posts, than there are on the forum.

Thank you for your help.

You need to disable Include Showpost Pages option within vBSEO Sitemap Generator options. After that you need to manually delete all xml.gz extension files from vbseo_sitemap/data folder and regenerate sitemaps within vBSEO Sitemap Generator interferance.

Ok, I will do that.

What is your opinion on the duplicate meta and description tags? Sould I leave them there and not worry about it....OR....remove all the duplicate meta tags for the search engines? This question pertains to my content files on my website not the forums.

Thank you for all your help.

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

You need to disable Include Showpost Pages option within vBSEO Sitemap Generator options. After that you need to manually delete all xml.gz extension files from vbseo_sitemap/data folder and regenerate sitemaps within vBSEO Sitemap Generator interferance.

Mert,
Thank you for your advice. I did what you said and this is the "before and after" results:

BEFORE:
Summary:
============================
Forum Display: 2348
Show Thread: 49280
Show Post: 274582
Member Profiles: 4230
Poll Results: 72
Blog Entries: 0
Blog Tags: 0
Album URLs: 40
Social Groups URLs: 20
Tag URLs: 2118
Archive: 235

Total Indexed URLs: 332905


AFTER:
Summary:============================
Forum Display: 2350
Show Thread: 49316
Show Post:
Member Profiles: 4234
Poll Results: 72
Blog Entries: 0
Blog Tags: 0
Album URLs: 40
Social Groups URLs: 20
Tag URLs: 2118
Archive: 235
Total Indexed URLs: 58364

I also noticed that instead of 17 sitemaps there are only 3 now.