If your articles are in a folder titled articles, do the search engines see them any less compared with if they are in the root folder?
I dont believe it matters as long as search engine spiders can access the folder. So as long as your Robots.txt doesnt disallow that folder then you should be fine...
So if you can access the pages online (without any special passwords or anything) it doesn't matter where or in what folder they are located?
Whoa whoa whoa! It is easier to get PR and rank with anything in the root directory unless you are a huge site with authority already.
From my (limited) experience, directories and files higher up toward the root dir. get the greater share of spidering. Supposedly, deeper-linked pages tend to get passed over unless the site is more authoritative/trusted, or higher PR.
How high of a pr is needed before it doesn't matter anymore. Also, does this rule apply to forums, meaning MySQL based forums rather than perl non-based ones like YaBB?