How can public access to WordPress query (e.g. author=) URLs be redirected?

Question

I maintain a WordPress site (I'm a programmer but don't have much WordPress experience), and we've noticed that Google is ending up with high-ranked links to "pages" on the WordPress site that we don't really want to be available, such as:

sitename.net/?author=2

which lists a dump of all pages written by author number 2, which were supposed to only be viewed in a certain way where they're organized and presented as intended. Is there a way to disable this feature, and/or redirect links to such things to the main site or some other relevant URL?

Answer 1

Based on @czerspalace 's tips, I seem to have created a working filter for this.

I added the following function to the functions.php file in my twenty-twelve theme directory:

function redirect_author_query_to_home( $query ){
    if( is_author() ) {
        wp_redirect( home_url() );
        exit;
    }
}
add_action( 'parse_query', 'redirect_author_query_to_home' );