That title in and of itself might not necessarily be considered keyword stuffing, particularly if products of that nature all appear on the page. I mean, it looks a little funky to us, but it's pretty common, particularly for pages that have a variety of products on them.
It does have a variety of the same closely related products on the page (meaning they are all variations of Blue Widgets) with some minor variations in material or design.
Paid directory links - depends on the directory.
These are generally "SEO Directories"; the owner's of the directories proudly state that by paying for a listing in their directory that your page rank will improve.
These directories don't have any "good" backlinks themselves. the owners of these directories usually own several and interlink between them, or get backlinks by paying for listings in other SEO directories.
And if the anchor text doesn't match the spammy seeming keywords in the title, that might help.
Taking the "blue widgets" example above, and pretending that a widget is a type of appliance, they most often use the anchor text "colored appliances" and point it at their home page (not this landing page).
Oddly enough, I saw a lot of links where they used a far more esoteric word than "appliances"; The word they used is a loan word from French and would normally be written with an accent mark above one of the vowels. When looking through backlinks with this word in it, some times it was rendered legibly, sometimes without the accent mark, sometimes there was one of those real funky looking characters instead.
There are a few examples where it is exact "blue widgets" and pointed at their landing page, but not for the most part. The exact match anchor text tends to come from article directories instead of SEO directory listings (like hub pages and squidoo).
Oh, and they own about four other sites that are SOMEWHAT similar and interlink between them.
Perhaps the SERP gets clicked on a lot...
Could be, although there isn't any value proposition displayed in the search results. Just the spammy title, and a weak meta description that pretty much echoes the title. If their listing gets clicked a lot, if probably primarily due to the fact that it is listed first.
(Is it possible in any way that google uses clickthrough rate of adwords and applies that in ranking calculations for organic SERPs? Their adwords ads are much more compelling than their organic title and description.)
Further, I don't think they are benefiting from any form of brand recognition. the company's name is NOT in the title (although, obviously, it is in the displayed URL under the title).
perhaps it is shared a lot
Possibly. The social buttons FOR THAT PARTICULAR PAGE are down in the footer area, so I don't know how much action they get. You have to scroll down a LONG way to see them.
However, clicking through to one of the product pages, the social buttons appear right below the product images, and they do have a better than average number of shares (for this niche).
one other thing: the site does have a halfway "exact match" domain name, since their domain name is something along the lines of: widgetirrelevant.com (where the irrelevant word is just some sort of funky word that doesn't really convey any sort of value proposition either).
