If you used Simple URLs then your CMS is Wordpress (Content Management System).

I didn't mean to scare you though.  301s on your own site are fine.  Don't worry about them as long as they are coming FROM pages that you don't want to pages that you DO want.  The way you have them working on your site are perfect.  That's what they are for.  I have thousands of them on one particular site that I work on.  Have you had a chance to read through SEOmoz's SEO 101 (beginners guide to seo) yet?  It is a great starting point.

But, let me just clarify the 301 thing.  If an off site link is coming into a non existent page and you 301 that page, you'll lose some of the link juice coming in from that off site.  So it will be better to change the link from the offsite at the source.  301s on your own site are fine though.  For instance, if you 301 the non www to the www version of your site, that is a 301.  That's obviously good for users and good for search engines.

Sorry for the confusion.

Firstly, 404s are a natural part of the web and don't think it will kill your site.  It won't.  When you get a 404 error iit can mean that something is pointing to that page or that Google has seen the page before but now it's not there.  Google wants to make sure that that page is completely gone and not an accident to the 404.  Technically if you have nothing pointing to the old post (no external links coming in and no internal links either, including sitemaps) then it will go away after a few crawls.  If you do however have off-page links coming into that page a 301 would definitely be a good idea (best idea would be to get those sources to change the link to the new page url but that's not always possible.  Remember, when you 301 you do loose some link juice)

If you are on Wordpress there are some great plugins to do this like the 301 redirect option on Wordpress SEO by Yoast

If you need to do this manually then let us know and we'll give you the actual code to do it in your .htaccess

I didn't dig into their site but I can tell you there is some sort of co-citation going on there.  Rand did an awesome WBF a little while back that probably explains exactly what is going on.

I've seen strong correlation between the keyword being in the page name / url  and rankings but in general a sub-page is generally more targeted for a keyword.

I just ran the seomoz on-page report card for your home page and sub page with the keyword being peer to peer lending and though they both received an "A" there were more factors helping the sub page.

No, 301 and canonicals are completely different

A 301 will redirect a page and a canonical is setting the preferred version of the page.  For example:

301 - you have an old version of the page that looks like this  www.example.com/p?=153 and you want it to look like www.example.com/red-apples.  You would use a 301 from the old page (www.example.com/p?=153) to the new page (www.example.com/red-apples)

Canonical - Lets go back to the red apples example.  Lets say you have a ecommerce site and you have different ways to search for products.  One way is to search by fruit and the other by color.  So what you'll have is two versions of the end result.  For example.  You'll have www.example.com/fruit/red-apples and you might have www.example.com/red/red-apples.  Since both of those pages show the same information you don't want the engines to think its duplicate content so you can add a rel=canonical link element to both pages to the preferred version of the two. (ie you might want to have the canonical be www.example.com/red-apples)  That's all it does.  It tells the engines your preferred version of the pages that may be the same.

Back to your original post, you really don't need to "noindex" but I thought you were having a duplicate content issue and that would solve the issue. (Generally, Google won't penalize you this sort of duplicate content)

Here is what I would do.

If you don't have Google Webmaster tools already set up then do so.  Verify each version of your subdomain,  (ie.  india.xyz.com, uk.xyz.com, etc)(let me know if you need help) and then set your Geo Target for each them manually (You'll have to set this up manually because you have a gTLD and not a ccTLD)

How to set your Geo Target manually.

To to a particular version of your site in WMT (ie. india.xyz.com) and click on "configuration" then "settings".  Under "settings" the first sections says "Geographical Target".  "Check" the box and then use the drop down to select "india".

Repeat this for all of your subdomains for each specific country.

This will let Google know that you are trying to target users in a specific country.

If you have the money to invest in it, I would also try to have those subdomains hosted by a server in each particular country. (strong signal for Google)

Hope it helps.

I disagree.  I said "noindex" not "nofollow".  Link juice will be passed but not show up in the Serps.  I do agree with you though that the strategy as a whole, if there is in-fact exact/duplicate content, seems to be a waste.  Unless these pages are in another language, I don't see the point of this subdomain strategy.