How to display review counts with no ratings in Google RichSnippets

Question

My requirement to display is to display the review count in Google RichSnippets for reviews that may not have associated ratings. The validator doesn't show any RichSnippet and complains with:

Error: rating could not be normalized
Error: rating is empty

I uploaded the offending html to https://gist.github.com/jmjpro/9956487.

I provide more background to the question on my blog post.

Answer 1

Google will not display a rich snippet for a review if a rating is not included in the review markup. You can mark it up as such, but it won't generate a rich snippet. And it's also against Google's guidelines to mark up reviews and ratings that were obtained on third-party sites.