So my old domain was expired, so I ended up switching to a new domain and just transferred the whole site. Since the content is the same, do I get penalized for that?
You have to redirect all pages of your old site to new one using 301 redirect and than submit a change of url request in Google webmasters tools. This will prevent you to being penalized by Google as a duplicate content.
Why you switched to a new one? ...It happened to me too but I asked them to renew it even the domain was expired already. BTW...I have the same goal, to migrate my website content to a WP...but Im afraid of losing all organic traffic
Since you mentioned you use Wordpress it's best to set this up within your .htaccess file (or any site for that matter). By doing this its permanently redirecting all search engines and other users who might go to the old links. Add the following code: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC] Code (markup): NOTE: And off course change the domains to your domains. And if you are wanting to redirect particular pages, then use the following line within your .htaccess file: Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm /newfile.htm Code (markup): I hope this has helped.
You may not get penalized for same content however you'll loose all organic keywords, traffic & rank. To avoid all of this you can 301 redirect your old domain to new domain and then in Google search console add request for domain change. This way I could change my domain without any noticeable rank or organic traffic loss. P.S. Since you're using WordPress there are many plugins for 301 redirects but if you use Apache(and in most cases you do) I recommend you .htaccess method, it's faster & way better. Just add this code with your old & new domain to anywhere in .htaccess RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]