If I move the sidebar widgets like Archives, Recent Articles, Comments, Etc... to footer - would this hurt the SEO value in any way?
It depends on your theme. Some feature rich theme allows to move us to without any problem. But most of free theme will change the code. Try to make that content comes first in source then widgets for better SEO.
Any time you change the crawl order of your site you change what Search Engine bots may or may not read. This is good or bad. Only way to find out is to test. If it's ain't broke don't fix it. If it is broke, track your changes.
Placing of sidebar has a very little value on SEO. Search engines look for appropriate keywords in pages, not to find where its placed, at top or bottom. You better focus on content.
The only reason why it may have a value is that some search engine spiders have a limit of how many links they'll index on a specific page. For example it's generally understood (although I don;t recall any actual confirmation. Feel free to provide a link if anyone knows of it) that Googlebot will only index a hundred links on a single page. If you move the order around and those widgets and you have over a hundred links before them, those widgets may be missed.
I don't see a reason why it would hurt your SEO at all. Whether your widgets are in the sidebar or in the footer, does not matter.
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3708201 Dan wrote a good post on this a while ago. Keep in mind its a tad dated so some things on built into wordpress now. hope that helps, Nigel
search engine only read your content in your blog, i think it doesn't matter if you remove the sidebar widget