Lightroom Moving Files after importing

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You do not need to use lr to move the files, although you can easily enough

If you do move your photos then it's simple just to delink your light room directory location to where you now have the photos

BUT if you you do move the files outside of lightroom is the metadata conserved?? Imagine come the time someone changes computers or hard drives and then having to manually type in thousands of keywords all over again.
When images are "de-linked" in LR do the images still contain the metadata when it is "relinked" again?