Just in case you missed the news from a year and a half ago, the Google link operator is dead. This was officially confirmed back in January 2017 that Google no longer supports this search operator, i.e. [link:www.domain.com] is dead.

Gary Illyes from Google had to respond with the news on Twitter:

John Mueller from Google also responded:

So stop trying the link operator, it doesn’t work and isn’t reliable.

Forum discussion at Twitter.