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We have an aggregate review page that we've set up with structured data. Unfortunately, when 0 reviews have been written for a product, we get the error:

0 (The value provided for reviewCount must be a positive value.)

I found this GitHub issue where people sort of contest the fact that this should be an error. It's still an aggregateReview, it just doesn't have any reviews yet.

Nevertheless, Google seems to treat this situation as an error. In this case should I just hide all the structured data? I am feeling kind of impelled to simply ignore the error.

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    How is it an aggregate review if there are no reviews? If you don't have any reviews you can't have an aggregate.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jan 9, 2018 at 10:36
  • Do you mean AggregateRating?
    – unor
    Jan 9, 2018 at 14:59
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    If your using a template that is repeated on each pages then I recommend that you use IF greater than PHP >= else remove itemprop and other associated markup meaning your code is squeaky clean for Google Search Console.
    – Simon Hayter
    Jan 9, 2018 at 22:22
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    In the end, you can also just leave it as is. This type of error won't result in a penalty, and since there are no reviews anyway, it will just be ignored, which will have the same effect as no reviews. Once you get a review, the code will pass, and once crawled, you'll be eligible to show the review.
    – Henry Visotski
    Jan 10, 2018 at 0:34

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I would don't risk to trigger an error - such kind of errors will surely not trigger a penalty, but could negatively impact quality metrics of a page, you never know...

Do you test you pages? I test with Selenium and iMacros - and in each test i run i include one artificial click on rating star (surely on 5 ;) On this way each newely published page gets immediately after publishing the rating counter on 1.

There are many ways to do the first click... You can even don't click, if you set the counter on 1 at publishing the page.

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