This paper proposes to understand the retrieval process of relevant documents against a query as a two-stage process: at first an identification of the reason why a document is relevant to a query that we called the Effective Relevance Link, and second the valuation of this link, known as the Relevance Status Value (RSV). We present a formal definition of this semantic link between d and q. In addition, we clarify how an existing IR model, like Vector Space model, could be used for realizing and integrating this formal notion to build new effective IR methods. Our proposal is validated against three corpuses and using three types of indexing terms. The experimental results showed that the effective link between d and q is very important and should be more taken into consideration when setting up an Information Retrieval (IR) Model or System. Finally, our work shows that taking into account this effective link in a more explicit and direct way into existing IR models does improve their retrieval performance.