what is penguin update 4.0?

The Real Time Google Penguin Algorithm is LIVE
Today we received an official confirmation from Google - Google Penguin 4.0 is officially part of  Google's Core Algorithm:

"Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. (...)  With this change, Penguin's data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we're not going to comment on future refreshes."

The "real-time feature" implies that effects of the Penguin algorithmic filter, i.e. demotions and promotions of organic rankings for a website due to link spam (unnatural links) happen faster than in the past. In the past, every Google Penguin update brought drastic changes.

Penguin 4.0 is the last Penguin update in history. There will be no other update.


Important points about the Real Time Penguin
The Google Penguin positive or negative signal is now recalculated on crawl. Link Detox Boost is therefore the perfect tool also to "test & try" links effects and not only make the disavow work.
Google Penguin now not only affects the whole site (or not). It has its impact on all levels like domain, folders, pages and probably also keywords and keyword groups. So anything that goes into the organic rankings will now be affected by the Penguin algorithm on a fine level.
Because of 2. it will be harder to diagnose "small Penguin penalties" in many cases.
Since Google Penguin will be more granular, it can mean that an aggressively SEOed part of a website trips the Penguin filter, while other parts are ranking fine. This will makes doing a competitive research using Competitive Link Detox (CDTOX) for every main topic a site covers more important to understand different risk level standards.
Because of 4 the "Subfolder Analysis" Feature of Link Detox (launched 2014) will become one of the most popular features to diagnose and fix Penguin bases ranking issues (in conjunction with Link Detox Boost).
The "Filter Slice Feature" that Link Detox and LRT have for years will be very helpful to analyze the risk per groups of keywords, groups of source domains, countries, types of links and many more.
What we can expect from Google Penguin 4.0
Following Google Penguin since its first launch in April 2012 we've analyzed and recovered hundreds and thousands of website
and put together a lot of material, experience, and historical data that trains our Link Detox Genesis algorithms.

"Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. (...)  With this change, Penguin's data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we're not going to comment on future refreshes."

The "real-time feature" implies that effects of the Penguin algorithmic filter, i.e. demotions and promotions of organic rankings for a website due to link spam (unnatural links) happen faster than in the past. In the past, every Google Penguin update brought drastic changes.

Penguin 4.0 is the last Penguin update in history. There will be no other update.

"Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. (...)  With this change, Penguin's data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we're not going to comment on future refreshes."

The "real-time feature" implies that effects of the Penguin algorithmic filter, i.e. demotions and promotions of organic rankings for a website due to link spam (unnatural links) happen faster than in the past. In the past, every Google Penguin update brought drastic changes.

Penguin primarily targets content that has been optimized excessively – one that has too much of poor link building technique and stuffing of keywords. The phrase keyword stuffing means using keywords that are not necessary do not occur in an organic manner or are not relevant.