Different Categories, Same Meta Description?

[JABacchetta]

I've heard that having duplicate meta descriptions is bad for SEO and can even be the cause of penalties.

However, a duplicate meta description would make sense for different categories on many sites. So I'm wondering what the best solution is for a case like this?

One of my sites has around 150 topics, and each topic page is exactly the same, aside from including only things that are related to that specific topic. So why would I want to create 150 different meta descriptions? Not only is it time consuming, and nearly impossible to create 150 unique descriptions for the same type of content, but it also serves no purpose for visitors coming from the search engines.

A logical approach would be to use the same meta description and just switch out the topics in the description... but then all of those descriptions would be 95% the same - and I imagine Google might see that as spam.

So... suggestions?

[SEOAndy]

assuming use of wordpress here, if you use the seo plugin YOAST and then go to your categories one-by-one you can edit the descriptions and titles, removing your issue. you can also have the plugin do the work to some extent by exchanging category names into your meta tags but they obviously aren't as good as handwritten descriptions.