Loads of my crappy links are no longer live, how can I make the most of this?

Like most of us I have bought loads of rubbish links (as well as made some very good ones) & in an effort to clean up over optimised keyword terms checked all my links so I could see if it was possible to delete them..but Im finding a lot of the ones showing in Yahoo site explorer (the SEOmoz version) are no longer working, going to godaddy etc. So, can I get them ignored or will they continue to count against me? Would pinging them work?