Google has officially confirmed that they have begun rolling out the Penguin 4.0 real time algorithm on the Google webmaster blog. The earlier Penguin update named Penguin 3.0 had been confirmed in October 2014 but this is the last time Google will be confirming a Penguin update again.

Google said that since it is a real-time algorithm they are not going to comment on future upgrades; meaning that as soon as Google recrawls and reindexes your pages, those signals will be immediately used in the new Penguin algorithm. The same had been done with Panda when it became a part of the core algorithm.

Google also said that it is now rolling out and the full impact may not be seen until it rolls out completely. However, the process shall not take long. Earlier, the sites affected by Penguin were updated periodically. Once a webmaster considerably improved their website and its web presence, many of Google's algorithms would take that into consideration really fast while others like Penguin needed to be refreshed.

However, with this update, Penguin’s data will be updated in real time and changes will be visible much faster taking effect shortly after Google recrawls and reindexes a page. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole website.

In short, as soon as the pages are indexed, Google will immediately recalculate the signals around Penguin and instead of impacting the whole website, Penguin will affect the sites on a page-by-page basis.