I had a site which is now no longer live. I had a set of articles on it. Now I am making a new site but I am planning to use content from that old site. Are there any possibilities that Google will penalize me for duplicate content.
When I checked if any of the pages of my old site are live using site: sitename in google search, I could find zero results.
Please let me know
Quick answer to your question is NO, you won't get penalization for duplicated content as in fact, your actual content is not duplicated (means existing in several site/domains at the same time) as it is only in your NEW website.
In case you have external websites on the Internet, linking to your pages for you OLD site, you should have a 301 Moved Permanently on the OLD site pointing to your NEW site (more info here)
This allows you to pass Page Rank and redirect users to your NEW site, smoothly. Without 301 redirect, your pages on the NEW site will be counted with NO PR and could suffer of less ranking in the SERP.